


Holy Matrimony, Batman!

by unimole



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, F/F, Fluff, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-05-10 07:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 42,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5576062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unimole/pseuds/unimole
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If she'd ever had to think about it, Max would've said that that whole 'woke up married in Vegas' thing was just a dumb trope. As in, fictional. As in, doesn't happen to real people.</p><p>Sucks when you wake up one afternoon and have to reevaluate your entire stance on tropes, huh?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Max woke up, simultaneously feeling like she’d slept for years and like she hadn’t slept a single second, her head was ringing. Actually, truly, probably audibly ringing. With pain. It was ringing with _pain._ Pain so bad she didn’t want to open her eyes. In fact, she was pretty sure if she so much as moved an eyelash in any direction, her head would shatter open and her brain would goo out between the cracks of her splintered skull, seeping into the offputtingly squishy and gummy-like pillow beneath her. She couldn’t stop the image from entering her mind, but it wasn’t a great thought to have: it didn’t make her head ring any less, but it did send a hot gush of nausea rushing up her stomach into her esophagus. Was she dying? A cough sent off another flare of sickness. Yep, she was totally, definitely dying. And she needed to get to a bathroom or a bucket or something but fast, or she’d vom all over—

She actually had no idea whose bed she was currently hanging out in. For sure it wasn’t her own. She didn’t even have to open her eyes to know that, because a) her limbs were all semi-comfortably resting on the mattress, which never happened when she woke up in a skinny regulation Prescott Dorm bed, and b) even though her Blackwell bed was a little cramped and hard, at least it didn’t have… latex sheets? Were those latex sheets? She tried to ignore the ways her head was currently screwing her over and pried her eyes open, wincing with the effort.

Chloe. She had to get herself to a decently suitable receptacle pronto or she’d vom all over Chloe. Seeing her best friend made Max a little less nauseous, though. Sure, she was almost certainly dying, but at least she’d have her BFF to hold her hand in the last few moments and stuff. She glanced around as much as she could without moving her poor head. Was this a hotel room? Probably. Well, maybe. It looked a little too spacious; Max didn’t have all that much money and neither did Chloe, obviously. It didn’t matter too much, though. The important part was that she could see a door cracked open and, through the crack, a wall tiled in a baffling bright Pepto-Bismol pink shade. It had to be a bathroom. A weird bathroom, but that was okay. Max could deal with a Barbie’s Dream House vibe as long as she could make it there before losing whatever food she might still have in her system. _Ugh, no, do not think of food._ She was parched, too: her tongue felt dried out, matted with dehydration. Had she done this to herself? _Why_ had she done this to herself?

She somehow managed to slide off the bed without immediately biting it, clutching her head between her two hands like that could possibly do anything to alleviate the pain. She rushed to the bathroom as quickly as she could, kneeling on the cool, pink porcelain floor as she expelled whatever awful, awful thing was in her stomach: pure poison, most likely, and various colors of bile.

Definitely a hotel, she decided as she gingerly rose to her feet, feeling a little better, maybe, for throwing up. The mirror over the sink was really smudged, but it was flanked by two baskets of assorted hotel-ish things – folded hand towels, tiny soaps still wrapped up in their papers, yes! a little tube of no-brand toothpaste! Pretty fancy for a place with pink walls and rubber sheets. Well, she supposed a hotel room this large probably had to have _something_ fancy going for it. There were no complimentary toothbrushes that Max could see, however, so she picked up the toothpaste and squeezed the whole thing into her mouth, trying not to gag. Her morning breath this particular morning could level buildings. _Was_ it even morning? She should probably investigate. Maybe Chloe knew something Max didn’t. It was often like that, even though Max was supposedly the one with the killer powers.

Even lying on the strange bed – the sheets were definitely latex or PVC or some such; shiny and fuchsia, they made the bed look kind of like the vibrating heart bed in the first Sims game – and even though she had plainly passed out in her clothes, Chloe looked uncharacteristically peaceful as she slept. Her makeup was uncommonly garish and a little smudged and her bullet necklace was tangled up in itself, but her blue hair curled over her cheek like the hair of a mermaid or something. Her hands were relaxed; her jaw wasn’t set with tension for once. Max felt her heart twist with something. Yearning, maybe. Wishing Chloe could feel at peace like this always.

Unfortunately, Max would have to break that peace, because she really, really needed someone to share this predicament with, cry for her as she succumbed to the poison, that kind of thing.

“Chloe,” she hissed. “Chloe!”

Chloe opened just one eye.

“Huh?” she said. She looked over at Max, then down at the bed, and her face crinkled with confusion.

“What’s going on?” Max asked.

“You tell me, Max.” Chloe was still looking at the bed. “Is this _latex_?” She stroked over it with the flat of her palm, incredulity written all over her still-scrunched-up face.

“Chloe.”

“It’s like sitting on a huge condom. A _novelty_ condom. Spencer’s Gifts stylez.”

“Chloe!”

Chloe looked back at Max, finally. She was clearly not at the same point of possibly-most-likely-dying as Max. Which was good, because Max did not want that awful bed to have to be Chloe’s death bed. Did she have to look so perky, though? Max supposed Chloe’s liver was way more used to this level of liquor than Max’s own. It had to be liquor, right? Even if it felt like actual poison. Of the cyanide kind.

“What’s with your hair?” Chloe asked after a pause. Her hair? Max hadn’t dared to look in the smudgy mirror yet, because she was pretty certain she looked as bad as she felt. She did dare to tentatively touch her hair, though. It felt spiky with something, hard and jagged. After some investigation, Max realized that her hair was holding a ton of clips, clips placed apparently at random, a couple of clips here and there just barely holding on to a few strands of hair. She removed one of them and placed it in the palm of her hand: it was a tiny butterfly clip, transparent pink, one of those things that were huge in the nineties when Max was a kid. Also of note was a ring sitting on one finger. Max wasn’t big on rings, generally. She usually took them off and put them down somewhere and lost them forever, so this was kind of new and weird, all things considered. She didn’t twist it around to check, but considering the nineties theme she apparently had going on, it was probably a mood ring.

“Yeah, I have no idea what’s with my hair,” Max finally said, having ascertained that there were enough clips up there that she probably looked like a weird-ass porcupine.

“I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time?” She looked at Chloe, whose brightly colored eyes looked even more ridiculous now that they were open. “Same as your makeup.”

“My makeup?”

“Must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time, right?”

Unlike Max, Chloe appeared to have no compunction about looking at herself in the mirror. Or the screen, as the case may be. She whipped her phone out of her pocket – at least they hadn’t managed to lose that, which was something – and turned the front cam on.

“Whoa, that is some hella ugly eyeshadow,” Chloe had to agree. Max moved closer and watched over Chloe’s shoulder as she angled her cell so that her eyes were center stage. The cam was kind of laggy; every time Chloe blinked, the Chloe onscreen closed her eyes a full second later. When her eyes were fully closed, you could see the colorful horror of it all: the very electric blue eyeshadow coupled with the thick-lined and very electric blue eyeliner coupled with the very electric blue mascara that had had no problem at all tinting Chloe’s blond eyelashes, well, very blue.

“Interesting. Dunno where we would’ve picked all of that up. But I guess they gotta have drugstores in on the Strip, too.”

“Oh, yeah!” said Max, excited to finally remember something, if somewhat horrified at the actual memory. “We’re in Vegas, aren’t we?”

Chloe shot her an amused look which, coupled with the blue overload around her eyes, made her look a little nuts.

“You mean you didn’t even remember where we are?” she asked, grinning. That grin.

“No, no, of course I remember.” And she did, now that Chloe mentioned it. But prior to that, yeah, there had been some flashes of riding shotgun in the truck, slugging down bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and hiding them whenever they passed a toll booth… Wow, she’d started drinking pretty early. Though even Max wouldn’t get this trashed on Mike’s goddamn Lemonade, surely. Of course she remembered they’d been headed to Vegas. And then the bright lights and stuff. Actually, she recalled, it had been her suggestion that they change their road trip destination. They’d been to Portland so many times and Chloe had been only too happy to change things up, so happy she hadn’t even minded the longer drive. It was all coming back to Max now. Well, the car part of it all was sort of coming back to her. And the part where she wanted Chloe to think she was cool and spontaneous. Which had really been such, _such_ a stupid idea.

“You remember anything else?” Chloe asked.

“Not too much. And I have a _killer_ headache.”

“I’m sorry, dude.” Chloe reached out and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “I can run out and get you some painkillers if you want. Gotta have some at the front desk even in a dump like this.”

“No, it’s okay. Thanks, though.” Awful though the headache was, it was possibly beginning to show some signs of abating. The presence of Chloe usually made her feel happier with life, so who was to say it didn’t have some actual healing properties? Like, who knew?

“How’s your hangover?” Max asked, though she assumed it had to be a little less completely horrifying than her own.

“I’ve had worse. Of course, I still feel like I’ve been kicked in the face over and over.” Chloe looked at her hand, still sitting on Max’s shoulder, then drew it back and turned it over. “No bruises, though, so I’m assuming you’ve only used your powers for good!”

Oh, God, what if she’d used her powers.

“Did I use my powers much?” Max asked, desperately hoping Chloe would be like, no way.

“Max, I don’t remember shit,” Chloe said. “We both must have blacked out. End of. I have no idea what you did with your time-bending ways.”

That sounded ominous. What if they went to a casino and time-traveled them out of tons of money and now there were security guards and loan sharks and stuff after them? She’d read about things like that. Well, minus the time-traveling element.

“Chill,” Chloe said, possibly reading her mind. Max tried very hard to follow her instructions. She looked at something – anything – to try to take her mind off this whole situation.

“Aw, look,” she said, perking up a little. Chloe was still making faces at herself into her phone, clearly not sure whether she hated her new ‘hella ugly’ look or kinda dug it, but on the hand that was not wrapped around the phone, Max spied a ring. A cheapo ring, clearly. Come out of a gumball machine, probably, but as Max finally turned her own ring around, she noticed that they matched. They were little love hearts; rather, they were a love heart broken into two pieces. Chloe had the right piece stuck to her ring, Max’s ring held the left part. “We got friendship rings.”

“Yeah,” Chloe said. She put her phone away and looked at her ring a little begrudgingly. It was probably not cool enough to be in the vicinity of her bullet necklace. Max didn’t care. They’d apparently made their friendship official, which was, if utterly pointless and nerdy, at least kind of sweet. And Chloe had better wear the ring.

It was true, though, that even the ring made Max a bit uneasy, sweet or not. What on earth had they been doing for a whole night – the alarm clock currently read 3.36 P.M. but who knew how long they’d been awake before crashing – and why could she remember so little of it? Aside from the obvious answer of ‘alcohol, and too much of it.’

Meanwhile, Chloe had found a top hat. A very small one. The kind you clip to your hair, and the crocodile grip hadn’t gone down without a fight, clearly, ‘cause there was a bunch of bright turquoise strands of hair stuck between its teeth.

“Hey, look!” she called to Max, in better spirits again. “This gotta be mine, right? It is now.” She clipped it into her hair. Max had to admit it made her look pretty dapper. Even with the crazy eye makeup and all.

Still, there was a sinking feeling in Max’s stomach. If there was anything she just wasn’t used to, it was losing time.

“Chloe,” she said. “I’m worried about this.”

“About the top hat? Sorry to say you’re alone there. This is dope as fuck.”

“No! It’s really strange. Have you ever been out of it like this before? Do you think we were drugged?”

But Chloe had become preoccupied again, the top hat bobbing jauntily as she put her phone to the side.

“Cool. Check it out, Max.” Chloe was checking out her arm, where a new tattoo, still slightly raw and red around the edges, had been added on to her sleeve. It was a butterfly, small but highly realistic, though not yet filled in. It _was_ cool, if a little creepy in its detail. But Max was in no mood to appreciate it.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Did I get a tattoo, too?” It wasn’t like she’d never considered getting a tattoo, but she didn’t even want to know what kind of pic she’d get while wasted, never mind where. She frantically started looking herself over, scanning each arm, trying to twist her leg around to get a look at the back of her thigh. If Chloe had talked her into getting inked, surely she would have talked her into getting inked on the butt. That seemed in character. But Chloe was just looking at her, calm and possibly a little amused, as Max hopped around on one foot.

“I know you’re way too much of a square to realize this,” Chloe teased, “but if you’d gotten a tattoo last night, you would totally still be feeling it.

“Besides,” she went on as Max tried not to glare at her, “if you were really that drunk, like on-the-verge-of-blacking-out drunk, they wouldn’t have taken your money, anyway. That’s _kind_ of in the rules.”

“Yeah, but this is Vegas,” Max argued, only partially mollified. “I hear anything goes in Vegas.”

“Probably not stuff that would get them disbarred from their guild or whatever.”

Max had a second thought.

“But they did go ahead with you.” She shot Chloe an accusatory look, standing back on both feet finally. “You _remember_ this? You were lucid? What did we do? Chloe!”

“Relax, Caulfield. I remember _this_.” Chloe flexed her arm, the muscle beneath the skin making the butterfly jump. “I vaguely remember you _wanting_ a tattoo–”

“What? What kind of tattoo?” Max interrupted.

“I don’t know, dude, probably a deer, let’s be real. I do remember you were wasted, and I was well on my way to getting wasted, and then…” Chloe spread her arms with a flourish that seemed unnecessarily sardonic. “Then we were wasted. The end.”

“Yeah, but clearly not the end.” Max looked at the ring sitting on her finger, the skin beneath already stained a cheerful green from the cheap metal. “Like, the rings, the weird clips in my hair, _your_ tacky eyeshadow, the fact that I probably have alcohol poisoning… Chloe, what did we do?”

“Well, first of all, I’m pretty sure we weren’t drugged. To answer your earlier question. This is just what the morning after getting black-out smashed feels like.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not a very good feeling.” Max’s headache may be getting a little better, but she still felt considerably grumpy. “What if we did something stupid? What if we killed someone?

“And look at this room!” She gestured around her, ignoring the way it made her head throb. “It’s gigantic. It has sofas and stuff. I think it has another room, too.” She gestured some more, this time towards a door neither of them had opened, but which didn’t look like a wardrobe and definitely wasn’t a door to someone else’s hotel room.

“We must have done something messed up so we could pay for this,” she concluded, looking around at everything the room held. The decorations might be tacky and the cleaning standards might be questionable, but they would’ve had to pay some serious cash for it. “Oh my God, Chloe, maybe we robbed a bank or mugged someone or something,” she said, plaintive bordering on panicking. She didn’t look good in orange. Chloe probably did.

At that, Chloe just laughed. It was a highly incredulous laugh, though she was also clearly a little pleased that Max thought she might be able to mug someone for a ton of money if she wanted to. Which – messed _up_ , Chloe. Jeez.

“Stop spiraling, Caulfield,” Chloe said, when she managed to stop laughing. “If you’re so worried about what we did, why don’t you just roll back time with your Golly-Gee-Mister superpowers?”

Like she hadn’t tried already. But of course she’d been blocked by the fact that she’d slept or passed out or whatever. That always seemed to be the way of it.

“No dice,” Max said. “It doesn’t work that far back.”

“Oh well.” Chloe was obviously not as concerned with any of this as Max, but then, Max supposed, she’d been through something like it before. She had definitely never been through it wielding super powers, though. That’s what mostly worried Max – what if she’d fucked someone or something over immensely and never even found out about it?

“I wish we could just go back,” Max groaned. “Like, I wish we’d made a list of all the places we were going to go to or something. At least then we would have had something like a clue, even if we would probably have strayed from it a lot.”

Chloe looked amused.

“Making a list of places you want to go before you get your drink on?” she said. “I was going to say nobody would ever do that, but it does seem like a pretty Max thing to do.”

“Oh, haha. Yes. I’m so boring.” Max was used to Chloe affectionately calling her lame and stuff, but c’mon, she’d suggested going to Vegas, hadn’t she? She tried not to frown or roll her eyes. Why couldn’t Chloe think she was at least a little cool? She kind of was, sometimes.

“Nah,” Chloe said, punching her in the arm just lightly. “I wouldn’t be BFFs with someone boring. You’re just highly organized and efficient. I bet keep an itemized list of every squirrel you’ve ever taken a picture of in your scrapbook.”

“Do not.” Keeping a record wasn’t the same as keeping an itemized list. “And you’re into it, anyway.” So was Max: squirrels were great. But this whole situation was not, and she couldn’t stop thinking about that fact, squirrels or no squirrels. She sighed.

“I just wish there was something we could do.” She felt pretty helpless. It wasn’t at _all_ a great feeling.

“Okay, then,” Chloe continued, apparently picking up on what Max was feeling and scrambling for a suggestion, “how about you check your satchel and stuff for photos? Like, you’ve never met a situation you didn’t want to commemorate with a selfie. Pretty sure being trashed wouldn’t stop you. That’s something.”

“I don’t know, is it? I mean, yeah, we can make an album of Chloe and Max’s Wacky Vegas Adventures, I guess.”

“No, you dork. I mean we can just look at the photos and figure out what we were doing. There’ll be a sign or something in one of the pictures. We could backtrack. Retrace our steps. Whatever.”

“That’s not actually a bad idea,” Max said, thinking. “Maybe someone will recognize us and say…” She trailed off.

“Say we told them all about our grand plan to loot a Walgreens for blue makeup?” Chloe supplied. “Say we were wielding a gun we, I guess, plucked out of thin air and said we were going to go end some poor fuck?”

“Yeah, right. If there’s one thing I know about you, Chloe Price, it’s that you could absolutely produce a gun out of thin air.” 

“That’s because I’m a modern day pirate! Packing heat everywhere I go.” Chloe grinned. “Just view this as an adventure. It’ll be fun. Maybe. Yay.”

“All right. Adventure ahoy.” Max was still a little discomfited by this whole thing, but it wasn’t like she had a better idea, and sitting around moping wouldn’t help matters. “Let’s go look for photos.”

 

\---

 

In a way, it was easier said than done. The satchel was no help; the pictures seemed to be everywhere _except_ inside the satchel. Like, had they just gotten back in the small hours of the morning and started throwing them around? Photos under the bed; a couple in the shower which both Chloe and Max really, really needed to brave, but which neither of them had, thus far, dared; photos jammed into one bedside table drawer but not the other; a photo half-hidden by a heart-shaped cushion in a grimy armchair. There was even one hanging precariously from a velveteen curtain courtesy of one of Max’s butterfly clips.

“I hope we didn’t drop them all over the hallway, as well,” Max groaned, but when she opened the door and scanned the corridor, she saw no photos anywhere. She did see something else.

“Someone brought us breakfast,” Max called over her shoulder. “I guess.”

“Oh?” Chloe wasn’t usually one to turn down free food, but she was staring pretty hard at a paper she’d apparently found somewhere, so Max just went back inside their room and set the tray down on the chest of drawers by the door.

It was kind of a weird breakfast, she discovered upon unwrapping glassware and checking out containers. There was a bottle of sparkling wine that even the most unscrupulous of sommeliers wouldn’t have had the temerity to call champagne, because it was bright, bright pink, kind of like the bathroom tiles. That was weird. There were two completely normal, as far as Max could tell, champagne flutes. They were just plain glass and nice enough. Somehow, that made them seem even weirder. There was a bowl of deflated-looking, warm strawberries. That was at least sort of weird and definitely off-putting. Finally, there was a handwritten note, and that was weirdest of all, because it was addressed to Chloe Price and Max Caulfield, and what it said was that the proprietor of the illustrious Great Northern Hotel extended his hopes and wishes that the happy couple had had a wonderful night in their wonderful complimentary honeymoon suite. So weird. So messed up. Even if they’d somehow managed to talk some poor sap into believing they were on a honeymoon in order to get a free room, though, at least it could have been worse. No bank robbing.

“Chloe,” Max said, twisting around to face her. “I think we scammed our way into a honeymoon suite. Look at this note.”

“No, Max.” A strange expression had come over Chloe’s face. “Look at _this_ note.”

Max squinted at the paper Chloe was holding. It had their names on it plus some signatures. It looked kind of _official_ , if that made sense. It looked like – but it couldn’t be.

“We didn’t scam our way into shit. Max. This is what we did last night. Last night, we got _married._ ”

Max looked at Chloe, whose expression she still couldn’t read. She looked down at her cheapo ring. Then she took three long strides from the door over to the creepy bed and collapsed on top of it, trying not to freak out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never set foot in Las Vegas, or indeed Nevada. In fact, I don't even live in America. If I've fucked anything up very badly, I apologize! The Great Northern Hotel definitely doesn't exist in Vegas and obviously doesn't even make sense as a name - it's just a dumb Twin Peaks reference. :D


	2. Chapter 2

Max was officially freaking out.

“Oh my God, Chloe. We have to get divorced!” She peeked up from her face-plant. Chloe was still staring at the document, but she didn’t seem super upset. Kind of weirded out, maybe.

“Why?” she finally said in a voice that didn’t sound totally Chloe-like. Max chose to interpret it as Chloe making fun of her lack of chill more than anything else, because c’mon.

“Why?” Max repeated. Maybe because they weren’t in love? Right? Well, Max wasn’t going to think about that, anyway, because it wasn’t the point and because they’d just found each other again after so long and they were best friends and there was no way she wanted to ruin that for, what, a few drunken kisses or something? Had they kissed? Max didn’t know. Whatever. Ugh!

“Dude, I _love_ you, but I’m not—” She couldn’t even bring herself to say it.

“We’re BFFs,” she said instead. “Partners in crime. Not _lovers._ ” But it sounded so stupid when she said it that she couldn’t really blame Chloe for snorting. “And, I mean, what about weddings?”

“What about them?” Chloe no longer looked weirded out. Instead she looked like she was trying desperately not to smile.

“My dad would probably have wanted to walk me down the aisle, maybe.” Max was certain of no such thing, and even if she had been, it would have been a bad excuse. Plus, Chloe almost definitely wouldn’t want a white wedding. And neither did Max. Not that they would have been getting married to each other, anyway! She was just being stupid. Freaking out.

“Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Caulfield,” Chloe said, “but that is a legit weird and sexist tradition.”

“How about wedding pictures? My mom or someone would’ve wanted to take wedding pictures. Joyce. Right?”

“So how about this?” Chloe slid a photo onto the bed. Max picked it up, full-on staring at it.

At a stretch, yeah, you could probably count it as a wedding picture. The butterfly clips that were still in Max’s hair had apparently at some stage held onto a square of white gauze, and Chloe’s miniature top hat did look pretty fly. And they were kissing, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, everything. (Max felt a tiny twinge of something and repressed that twinge quite strenuously, whatever it was. It was just that being a teenager was extremely confusing and also awful, she decided.) The only thing that marred the picture was an Elvis impersonator either photobombing them or walking into the shot by accident. Either way, you couldn’t see much of Max’s face.

“Seriously, Chloe?”

“Our future children will think it’s hilarious! Our tiny, blue-haired, hipster pirate children. Wearing itty bitty Oh Deer shirts.” Chloe grabbed a piece of paper or flyer or something out of her pocket, crumpled it up, and threw it at Max’s head. When Max looked up at Chloe, trying very hard to chill down or out or whatever, Chloe met her gaze and screwed up her face in an exasperated grimace.

“Of course not seriously, Max.” Chloe didn’t exactly look happy, but she sounded totally fine. “When we find the chapel, the dude can probably rip up the certificate or annul the marriage or something. Don’t worry so much.”

Max tried her best not to. Maybe that was a thing the officiator could do; she honestly didn’t know. But looking at the photo, there was no indication where they could have been. There was no sign with a name on it and even the locale itself looked suspiciously empty and bare. There had to be hundreds of chapels for marriages on the quick and cheap in Vegas and probably no shortage of Elvis impersonators populating those chapels, either. Maybe the one in the picture had even been the wedding officiator. Who knew?

“I’m gonna go brush my teeth, dude. My mouth’s hella rank. We’ll head out whenever you feel better, okay? Stop panicking, already.” Chloe disappeared into the bathroom.

For lack of anything better to do, Max unfolded the crumpled leaflet – well, it was more like a small poster – Chloe had tossed at her and emitted a low groan as she saw what it advertised. She sat up on the bed and held it up, stretched out, so that it would be the first thing Chloe would see when she came out of the bathroom, probably grumbling about the lack of a toothbrush.

She did do exactly that, looking hilarious with a smear of toothpaste across her lip like a snaggletoothy fang, but she shut up when she saw what Max was holding.

“Here’s our place to start, I guess,” said Max, giving the poster a shake.

On the poster, ‘Girls, girls, girls!!!’ was emblazoned across a very naked lady, breasts high and round, a cheesy grin stretched across her face. She was clad only in a leopard-patterned loincloth thing and a pair of cat ears on a headband. ‘Welcome to the Cat House,’ bolded letters on the bottom of the poster beckoned. ‘Meet our Purr-fect ladies!’ The random capitalization bothered Max more than the dumb pun. But at least there was an address included.

“Cat House, huh?” Chloe looked way more embarrassed than Max would have anticipated, but she still thrust her arms into the air in fake jubilance. “Bachelorette party! Whoo!”

“Just follow the trail of penis straws and hats.” They both snickered, even though it was really not very funny.

“Well, I figure, if we went there, we probably did it just before we actually… did it. Right?” Max continued. “And if you kept the flyer, we probably did go there. So someone there might know where we were headed afterwards.”

“Yeah, right. You just want to get your strip club on without being too wasted to remember any of it,” Chloe teased. Max had to laugh.

“Whatever, you weirdo,” she said, trying to find her high tops in the relative mess that was their hotel room – sorry, bridal suite. “Let’s roll.”

While Chloe was trying to cajole Google Maps into telling her how exactly to get to the Cat House, preferably on foot because who knew where the truck was, Max was staring down at her own phone. She had apparently been really, really pleased with her nuptials last night. Like, all caps, ten exclamation points, incomprehensible emoji-filled mass text pleased: she didn’t dare to read it, just look at it between her fingers. Her phone was blowing up with responses. She crossed her fingers and prayed she hadn’t included her parents on the list of recipients.

**Warren Graham (4:13 AM)** Whoa, Mad Max! That’s legit! Guess I never stood a chance, huh?

**Victoria Chase (7:34 AM)** It’s adorable that you think I care. Have fun trying to improve your sad life.

**Juliet Watson (7:40 AM)** Congrats, Max! You know where I am if you want an official wedding announcement in the Blackwell Totem.

**Brooke Scott (1:12 PM)** Good for you, Max.  
**Brooke Scott (1:12 PM)** Looking forward to the drive-in ;)  
**Brooke Scott (1:13 PM)** Sorry, that was for Warren.

Max knew that had very much not been intended for Warren’s eyes. She didn’t even care, either about passive-aggressive classmates or about Warren dating around. Whatever. She folded her arms in front of her and put her head down. Even if she had somehow thought getting married was a good idea at the time, how could she have been dumb enough to text Juliet Watson about it? Hell, why did she even have Victoria’s number programmed? 

“All set,” Chloe said, putting her phone back in her pocket and stirring Max from her reverie. “A couple of blocks away. Can you make it with your headache or do you want me to get you some Advil or something first?”

“I’m okay. Thanks.”

“Have a glass of water.” Max knew by Chloe’s tone of voice that she would not let her through the door without doing as she said. Which was kind of touching, she guessed. The concern. She even managed to find a cup that didn’t look too dirty, and the water actually seemed to help a bit.

“Good call, Chloe,” she said, grateful. Chloe just smiled at her and barged out of the suite, making Max scramble to keep up with her and her long legs. She hoped to God that the door wasn’t one of those self-locking ones and that one of them had a key card on their person.

 

\---

 

The Cat House was… something else. Max had anticipated, perhaps wrongly, a lot of glitz and glamor and maybe glitter canons? Pulsing music and disco lights? Poles for sure. She knew pole-dancing was a thing.

And indeed there were poles, so score one for Max! But there was very little glitter except for remnants from last night’s jamboree being swept up off the floor by a bored-looking janitor. Definitely there weren’t any red, throbbing lights or pumping music. There were women wandering around, but they weren’t made up or anything. They weren’t wearing costumes or spangled bras, just, like, sweatpants and plain t-shirts. 

The security guard had let them in hardly sparing a glance at their fake IDs, which was probably good, since Max suspected hers looked incredibly fake. Like, it looked like a normal ID card… but it also somehow looked really, really fake, probably. Why was she even using her fake ID? She was pretty sure you were allowed into strip clubs when you were eighteen.

(Max had a tiny flashback to some moment from the night before: trying to look sober enough to get to order a drink and then sweating bullets over her ID until the bartender began looking askance at her. Of course Chloe had swooped in and saved the day as always, though, rattling off an order and sliding her ID across like it was no biggie. Chloe was really such a bamf.)

Either way, the security guard hadn’t given a fuck, and then they were in, and nothing seemed to live up to Max’s expectations. Not that that was a bad thing, exactly. Obviously she wasn’t into ladies, so it would probably just have been embarrassing and awkward if there had been a bunch of naked women and strippers prancing around. Uh, she felt bad for Chloe, though.

To be fair, Chloe looked okay about it and not excessively disappointed, probably because she’d likely already been to strip joints a bunch, probably with her cool friend Rachel Amber. Max was just kind of curious, was all. Obviously she liked boys! The thought of male strippers in thongs and stuff was mildly repulsive, but there were often cute skater dudes in the hallways of Blackwell Academy, she reminded herself. And maybe she’d turned down Warren for the drive-in, but… well, she couldn’t really finish that thought in a satisfactory way, but just because she just wanted to be friends with Warren totally didn’t mean she was into ladies.

“Dude.” Chloe was staring at her. “Where even are you? You keep zoning out. Maybe you _do_ have alcohol poisoning.”

“Ugh, shut up.” Max stomach seemed to start gurgling dangerously again at the very mention of alcohol. She clutched it with one arm like she was trying to keep her guts in place.

“As long as you’re not actually dying, I guess.” Chloe looked extremely skeptical, but she pulled on Max’s arm. “C’mon. Let’s go see if we can find someone who’ll tell us about our probably awesome night.

“This is the most _Dude, Where’s My Car?_ thing that’s ever happened to me,” she added and, amazingly, laughed. Max did not join in.

“Give me a break, Max,” she said when she couldn’t coax even a smile from Max. “This isn’t the worst thing in the world. We could have done way worse.”

“We don’t even know what we did!” Max protested. “Maybe we did do something really bad.

But, to be fair,” she added, a little reluctantly, “if I was gonna get married to anyone on a whim in the middle of the night in Las Vegas, I’m kind of glad it was you.”

“Touching. Truly touching,” Chloe said dryly. Max had meant it, though, so whatever. What if she had gotten married to Nathan Prescott or something? Not that she would have gotten into a car with him in the first place, but still: nightmare. Even Daniel Da Costa or somebody like him would have been bad. Daniel was nice, but she didn’t know him like she knew Chloe. At least she and Chloe could work through this together. And maybe have fun doing it. Like Chloe had said, she just needed to look at it like an adventure. Well, she could try.

“What are you girls doing here in the middle of the day?” A woman, maybe a little older than the other ladies walking around and setting things up, was striding towards them, arms folded over her impressive chest. She looked like she probably was in charge of the place; she even had a name tag. Lucy Winfield, it read.

“We don’t open until seven. How did you even get in?” Winfield continued when neither of them said anything. 

Automatically, both Max and Chloe turned to look at the indifferent security guard, who had, at this point, fallen asleep. Winfield followed their gaze.

“I see,” she said. But she didn’t actually seem mad. Just curious.

“How old are you two?” was the second thing she asked.

“Eighteen,” Chloe answered for the both of them.

“Right. Then my fourth question is the same as my first: What are you doing here in the middle of the day? We open at seven, so I suggest…”

“No, wait,” Max interrupted, desperate. “We were here last night. We think.”

“You think?” The woman chuckled. “One of those, huh?”

Max didn’t really know what ‘one of those’ might be referring to, but she just went with it.

“Yeah. I guess so. We were really, _really_ drunk, and then…” She couldn’t really bring herself to say ‘then we got married’ but she rallied, “I guess we were having a bachelorette party. Maybe.”

“We don’t know for sure if we were actually here!” Chloe added, slightly unhelpfully, in Max’s opinion.

“But we were wondering if someone might recognize us.” Max began blushing hardcore, thinking of all the various, sordid reasons someone working there might recognize them. “And maybe they could tell us where we went afterwards? If we talked to them, I mean. I mean, her. If we talked to her.”

Winfield shook her head in amusement.

“Our ladies work very hard, you know,” she said. “They don’t lack for patrons. Nor is all our talent here on Sundays. You might have better luck if you return next weekend, but I wouldn’t bet on them recognizing you. Or if you ask Scott…”

Winfield looked back at the security guard again. He was still merrily snoozing away, head tilted back against the wall in a way that made Max’s neck ache just looking.

“Never mind.” She shook her head. “But congratulations on your engagement, girls! If you come back later and say Lucy said so, maybe you can swing a free lap dance. But for now…”

She didn’t finish her sentence or even gesture towards the exit, but Max understood they were being dismissed.

“Thank you so much for your help, Ms. Winfield,” she managed, always trying to be polite. Then she grabbed Chloe’s arm and together they strode out through the glass doors. Scott the security guard had started drooling pretty liberally. Max simultaneously felt sort of bad for him and felt her gorge rise.

 

\---

 

“Oh, don’t go all FML on me,” Chloe said when they were back out on the street, looking at Max’s admittedly glum face. “We’ll go back to Ye Olde Love Hotel and check out your photos. We’ll figure it out.”

It was nice of her to try to cheer Max up. It even worked a little.

“Okay, yeah. Let’s head back.”

They started walking. Chloe offered her arm to Max and Max took it. Just for a moment, it felt like Max and Chloe again, just best friends walking arm in arm. As opposed to Max and Chloe, best friends and also somehow wife and wife, walking arm in arm.

“Oh, yeah,” said Chloe. “You have the key or whatever, right? Keycard. Dunno what they use in shady hotels.”

“Um. No. Uh, should I take it that you don’t have one, either?”

“Excellent deduction, SherMax Holmes!” Apparently Chloe felt like that sounded a little too sarcastic, so she softened her tone. Not that Max had taken offense.

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” Chloe continued, sounding downright nice. “I mean, did we even lock?” 

“No, we didn’t lock. Because we didn’t bring keys. Ring a bell?”

Chloe laughed at that.

“Ah, well. Not like there’s much anyone might wanna steal in the room,” she said, shrugging.

“Maybe if you really have a thing for heart-shaped cushions and vibrating beds and stuff,” Max said.

“Whoa, wait. That was a _vibrating_ bed?” Chloe seemed pretty enthused about that idea.

“I have no idea, but let’s be real, it looked like the platonic ideal of a vibrating bed.”

“True dat.” Chloe nodded. “Wanna try it out later?”

“ _Chloe_ ,” Max groaned.

“Oh, right, I forgot! You don’t want to consummate this marriage.”

Max just stuck her tongue out at Chloe.

“No, no, wait. We’ve used the vibrating bed _several_ times since we woke up, because I’m irresistible like that. You just rewind time every time so I won’t get cocky.”

“Chloe,” Max laughed, “I don’t think you could get cockier if you tried. I think you’ve maxed out your cockiness stat.”

“There’s a dirty joke there, but to be honest I’m too hungover to come up with it.”

“Life is hard,” Max said.

“Probs a dirty joke there, too.”

 

\---

 

Finally they reached the confusingly named Great Northern. There were a couple of sleazy-looking types hanging around in the lobby, but no receptionist or anything.

“I'm worried this is one of those places were the doors lock immediately when you shut them,” Max said, while Chloe, dodging sleazeballs, was headed over to the clearly non-functional elevator.

“I’m not sure this dump is high tech enough for that,” Chloe said, all the while jabbing at buttons, trying to summon an elevator that, let’s face it, would never ever come.

“Dude,” said Max. “Stairs.” She wasn’t going to stand around here all afternoon just because Chloe was stubborn. Expelling a grumpy, gusty, purposely loud sigh, Chloe deigned to follow as Max made her way over to the stairwell.

“But you realize the honeymoon suite or bridal suite or whatever is all the way at the top, right?” Chloe said tersely.

“We can deal with some stairs,” Max said. “We’re eighteen, not eighty-eight.”

“Fine. But if my lungs explode or something…”

“Then I promise you you can have one of my lungs.”

“Whoo.”

It really was a long way up, and Max could tell Chloe was getting grumpier by the step. Not that Max was super into stairs or anything, but at least she was a little more fit than Chloe, just by dint of not smoking and stuff.

At least when they finally reached the top, they noticed that Chloe had been right and that the dump was in no way high tech enough for key cards, possibly vibrating beds aside. Nothing seemed to have been stolen, either, though it was hard to tell at a glance, since the suite was a mess of photos and overturned drawers and shit. Still.

“Home, sweet home,” said Chloe, voice tinged with sarcasm, and plopped down in one of the grungy armchairs.

“Well, at least we have…” Max looked around for something that might make Chloe feel better. “…warm strawberries.”

Yeah, not such an enticing thing. But it did get a laugh out of Chloe.

“I thought you might say at least we got each other, Caulfield,” she teased. “But I guess warm strawberries will have to do.”

“Let’s collect all the pictures and check them for signs and stuff now. Cheesy landmarks. I promise we’ll figure it out, SuperMax, so don’t be too bummed.”

Max actually wasn’t feeling too bummed right this moment – though she was certain to start spiraling again soon – but she appreciated the sincere concern in Chloe’s voice.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Max said. She walked over to the desk where they’d put down all the photos they’d found so far and sorted them in a relatively neat little pile.

“There might be more photos we haven’t found,” Chloe suggested as Max brought the pictures back to Chloe and sat down in the armchair next to hers. “Considering they were thrown all over the place.”

“Yeah,” Max agreed. “But we can check these out first. We might not need any more.”

“Let’s do it.”

Max divvied up the pile of pictures into two much slimmer stacks, handing one of them over to Chloe.

“Don’t just look for names, obviously,” she said. “Check for stuff you recognize, as well. Places or things.”

“Well, I’ve never been to Vegas before,” said Chloe, “but, sure, I’ll get my hard boiled private dick on. You gotta supply the whiskey, though.”

“How can you even talk about whiskey?” Max complained, still feeling like the literal embodiment of the phrase ‘green around the gills.’ “Actually, if you keep talking about alcohol, we won’t even need to go through this whole thing and get a divorce. Because I’ll kill you.”

Chloe laughed. One by one, they began going through the pictures.

 

\---

 

Chloe and Max both gazed down at all the pictures they’d spread over the coffee table.

Nothing.

They’d even set out on another search of the suite, Chloe slumping around with shuffling steps, Max much more frenzied as she searched high and low, but they’d come up with nothing, nada, nil. No photos, no complimentary matchboxes, no club leaflets… nothing. Even Chloe looked annoyed. Her jaw had tightened again.

How could Max have managed not to get even a street number into _one_ of the pictures? Most of the pictures had clearly been taken inside places, but in the few pics where they were outdoors, there were no identifiers that made sense – nothing they could find any information about on the Internet, at least. Which was probably because the rare outdoors pictures were basically just them sitting on park benches with their heads blocking out all the salient details or them crouching in front of a taxi, like there was anything uniquely interesting about taxis in Vegas. Also, side note: they had brought a car. They had no business cabbing it.

In one picture, they were crouching – why crouching? – in front of a building that was clearly a casino, almost definitely Caesars Palace. That was the only locational marker they’d found for all their searching, and it was a pretty useless one: if no one’d remembered them at the much smaller strip club, definitely not a soul would recall them from a gigantic casino. Maybe if they’d been drunk enough to make nuisances of themselves, but then if they got thrown out, nobody would likely have been offering to point them in the direction of a chapel, anyway. So, pointless.

Chloe was sighing very emphatically. She was currently collecting all the photos in a pile again and flipping them through, flicking them out over the table like she was dealing a deck of cards.

“Did you honestly not take a single non-selfie?” she asked Max in a terse voice. “Not even of, I don’t know, wildlife?”

“I’m unsure if there even is any wildlife here. And anyway, no, probably not.” Max said, feeling defensive, “I like selfies, okay? Don’t go all Victoria on me. I can’t handle it right now.” 

“So what are we gonna do, then?” Almost all the photos had fallen down on the floor again. Chloe wasn’t even bothering pretending like she was gonna pick them up.

“I have no idea, Chloe. Why are you so mad, anyway? You didn’t seem to care that much this morning.”

“You mean when we woke up this _afternoon_ with no memory that we _got married_?” she almost sneered. “Of course I care, Max. I didn’t want you freaking out like the world is ending, but yeah, I care. You think I wanted our – my wedding to be like this?”

“Whatever.” Max was pretty certain Chloe was only irritated ‘cause she’d set her mind on something – tracing their steps through the pictures – and it hadn’t worked out. It had been Chloe’s idea in the first place, after all, and she was the most stubborn person Max had ever met, probably.

“Don’t whatever me,” said Chloe, sounding for all the world like Max’s mother. Not that Max was really listening. She’d picked up the photo that had landed closest to her feet and was staring at it again. There must be something in there. No picture was entirely anonymous. How could it be? She looked at it even closer. The two of them were in a smoky bar somewhere, so dark you couldn’t make out a thing except the pallor of their faces, the blue of Chloe’s hair, the amber glint of the beer stein Chloe was brandishing at the camera, the red cocktail Max was gripping in her own hand. No signs; no real features of the bar itself, or maybe it was a club. Nothing. No matter how hard she stared.

“Whoa,” she vaguely heard Chloe say, suddenly. “Max!” Chloe’s hand shot out and grabbed her shoulder.

“What?”

Chloe visibly relaxed.

“I thought you were doing that thing you told me about,” she said. “Where you fixate on a photo and then you travel back into the past. You know? I got worried when you were just sitting there.”  
  
Holy shit. Max couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it herself.


	3. Chapter 3

“Chloe, you’re a genius!” That was actually a surprisingly good idea, not that Max was at all sure Chloe would endorse it. “I could really do the time travel thing,” she said. “I can go back into the past and see what we were doing when we took the pictures.”

“Max.” Chloe looked somewhat pained. “If you really want to go back and make sure that, yes, Chloe totally wore a top hat as I macked on her for ages in whatever nightclub, go ahead. But please don’t go around splitting timelines. It’s confusing.

“Shit,” she added, touching a hand to her temple. “Maybe you’re off splitting timelines already. How would I know? Fuck, you’re giving _me_ a headache.”

“I'm not. I won’t. Promise,” Max said. It seemed a little counterintuitive to go back without fixing things. Still, Chloe was probably right. Creating new timelines couldn’t really end well, and she’d still be leaving this timeline’s Max all worried and confused and fake-married, which seemed like another bad idea. If she went back and changed nothing, at least she’d know what the hell they’d been doing and where they’d been, so they could go back and kind of… retrace their steps. As long as they made it back to whatever chapel they’d found, at least, they could maybe talk the priest into divorcing them or ripping up the certificate or revealing he was not actually a priest but a church-themed stripper or something like that. All right, it was a totally half-assed plan, but it was better than nothing. Probably.

“Here you go, then.” Chloe handed Max a stack of Polaroids, which she must have swooped off the floor while Max was zoning out. “I think they’re in the right order. You can kind of tell because you go more and more cross-eyed…”

“Shut up,” Max said, but she couldn’t help but laugh. She picked up the first picture from the stack.

“Bring this.”

Max looked up and was immediately blinded by a flash. “Hey!” she complained as Chloe began flicking the resultant Polaroid vigorously.

“I just want you to be able to go back,” Chloe explained and handed Max the picture. Max looked at it kind of dubiously: she had a look on her face like someone had just yelled “Fire!” But of course Chloe had a point.

“Thanks,” Max said and pocketed it. She sat down on the slippery bed and picked up the first photo in the pile.

“So I think you’re headed to the tattoo place,” Chloe said. “There’s a bunch of artwork on the walls and I have a bandage on my arm in every other pic after this one, so.”

“Roger that.” Max wasn’t entirely sure how you were meant to behave in a tattoo shop, like if there was any sort of special etiquette involved. But then, she supposed it didn’t really matter. She wasn’t traveling back there to change history. She was just going to go with the flow, whatever the flow turned out to be like.

Though her head protested as she began to stare the picture down, eventually her eyes focused…

 

\---

 

And when she unfocused them again, the first thing she wanted to do was crack up. She laughed riotously, uproariously, laughed so hard she could hardly stand up straight and her stomach ached. It was weird: she wasn’t totally sure what was so funny, but she _was_ entirely sure that something was, in fact, funny. Straight up hilarious.

She actually stumbled from laughing, but then Chloe was there and righted her again. Chloe was laughing, too, but she seemed marginally more restrained than Max.

“You’re wasted, dude,” Chloe called out over the music that, Max was just realizing, was reverberating throughout the tattoo parlor they were in. “I can do this tomorrow, you know. Or I can dump you in a hotel by yourself. Lady’s choice.”

“Hell no,” Max heard herself protest. It was weird; she knew exactly what to do since she’d done it before, like her body recognized its prior movements, but she was still, somehow, in there. Watching and participating both. She really was very, very drunk, though. She could feel that much.

“Max. C’mon.” Chloe had wrapped her arm around Max’s shoulders. Max simultaneously remembered feeling and actually felt something warm descending over her. Like a blanket. A metaphorical blanket. “I don’t really want another tattoo, anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Max crowed. “You’ve been talking about it all night. All the way here.” Chloe shook her head but grinned, clearly kind of willing to be convinced.

“Okay. How about you just sit here and wait for me while I talk to the nice lady?” Chloe gesticulated towards a scratched-up bench that had probably been placed there for the very purpose of holding drunk would-be patrons. Luckily, nobody was sitting there. Max never did enjoy small talk.

“No way,” Max said, not because she wanted to but because she knew she had done so before. “I’m getting a tattoo, too.”

“Not tonight, DrunkyMax.” Chloe shook her head again. “They don’t want the lawsuits. Promise.”

“Then I’m sitting with you while you’re getting it done. In case it hurts.” _That’s a ridiculous thing to say_ , Max thought, like her past self could really hear it. _Chloe has a whole sleeve of tattoos. She knows what she’s getting into._

But Chloe didn’t object. She just looked a little embarrassed and made a grumpy face to cover it up and nodded her assent.

Max hung back, slouching down on the bench, as Chloe walked over to some woman – either a proprietor or artist or maybe both, Max guessed – and started chatting her up about tattoos and prices and stuff. Max couldn’t quite hear what she was saying over the beat, but the lady she was talking to pulled up this huge book or gigantic album and slammed it down on the counter in front of Chloe. Chloe started flipping pages and pointing emphatically at stuff, but Max couldn’t really make out what she was indicating. When she started pulling crumpled ones and tens and maybe the odd twenty out of her busted duct tape wallet, Max turned around and started looking at the tattoo artwork lining the walls, trying very hard to keep her gaze fixed and straight, even though it kept trying to slide and jump around. There were some nice designs. There were also a bunch of dumb stuff like cartoon characters in shifty positions and tribal armbands, clearly exclusively intended to adorn the meaty wrists of overgrown frat boys. But Max was drawn to the elegant outlines of birds in flight, the curlicue scripts you could get your favorite name, or maybe word, tattooed in… She should get a line from her favorite song! A Bright Eyes one. Which one? She debated with herself, misremembering lyrics, even as the second Max inside of her _knew_ that she knew how they went; so frustrating. The ‘Let’s sail away’ one, maybe. She’d always thought that was very pretty and maybe poignant in an English-class-on-symbolism kind of way.

No, wait. She should totally get Chloe’s name tattooed on her upper arm. It’d be ironic, like, you know, like old-timey sailors coming home and getting their love’s name tattooed inside a heart. Except Chloe wasn’t her _love_ love, of course, and anyway, like she’d said, it would be ironic, but it’d be nice and it would be kind of like a throwback to their pirate thing that they’d been into as kids, and it would — Max stood up — she really should just go and do it right now. No time like the present. _Whoa_ , the floor was slippery. _Slow down,_ present day Max tried to admonish her past self, which was really such a pointless and strange thing to do. Of course it didn’t help: The Max of yesterday night was still only halfway able to stand up on her own two feet. It was of some comfort that at least she was nearly totally certain she hadn’t ended up getting a tattoo.

“Hey, drunky!” Chloe called. She had her bare arm stretched out in front of her and the woman she’d been talking to was dabbing something on it, probably disinfecting the skin or cleaning it. What did Max know? She’d never seen anyone get a tattoo before. “You gonna come here and keep me company or what?”

“Uh-huh,” Max called back and started moving toward Chloe, unsteady like a newborn deer. Even that thought made her want to laugh. How great were deer? So great! There was a stool next to the stool Chloe was sitting on and she patted it with her free hand. Max practically fell down onto it.

“Sorry. She’s, uh, over imbibed,” Chloe told the tattoo lady. Max, both present and past, was impressed with the word choice, especially since her own tongue felt like it was at least two sizes too big for her mouth and hell-bent on making her mispronounce every damn word. Max suddenly felt very aware of her own tongue. It was just this big, slippery muscle in the middle of her mouth. So big. So strange, really, that everyone had these huge, big things inside their mouths all the time but no one ever talked about them.

Max tried to sober up, though, so no thinking about the technicalities of tongues, her own or otherwise. She sat up straighter; she tried very hard to wrestle her whole mouth situation into submission. When she asked Chloe, “So what are you getting?” she very nearly succeeding in sounding like an actual person and not a gallon of bourbon slushing around inside a human skin suit.

“I was thinking this,” Chloe said and pointed at an image in the huge album, which was still lying open on a table next to them. On the table, there was also a horrifying weapon that looked like a mix between a glue gun and a drill, which Max could only assume was how the ink would be penetrating Chloe’s skin. So ominous. She made a conscious decision to ignore the gun/drill/needle thing as much as she possibly could and looked where Chloe was pointing instead. The page showed an image of a butterfly, a blue one, remarkably similar to the one Max had taken a picture of the first time… that time…

“I thought it could, you know. Be a reminder of us. The road trip and meeting after so long and, you know.” Max had never known Chloe to stutter like that. Chloe wasn’t much of a stutterer, on the whole. But Max was really touched. Almost like she wanted to cry. Stupid alcohol.

“I love it,” she said softly.

 

\---

 

Max whooshed back into the future. Well, into the present. She guessed.

“No go,” she told Chloe.

“We didn’t say where we were going?” Chloe seemed to have made herself absurdly comfortable on the bed, all things considered. Such as the sheets.

“No. I just laughed a lot. Do you remember me laughing a lot?”

“You were super drunk, Max. Kinda comes with the territory.”

“I guess.” Max very rarely drank and had definitely never gotten _this_ drunk before. “Anyway, yeah. We were sitting there for a pretty long time, so I decided I should just go back and try a different photo.”

She sighed.

“It’s really weird,” she went on. “It’s like I’m overlaid on top of myself, you know? I have to just go with whatever I did yesterday, but it’s like being two Maxes inside the same body.”

“Yeah,” Chloe said, “That sounds like some stoner shit. I’d freak out. You’re cool for being able to do what you do.”

“Hey, thanks.” Max had never thought about her whole powers thing in terms of it, or her, being cool or not cool. Truth be told, she tried not to think about her whole powers thing very much at all. She didn’t want to raise a bunch of existential quandaries to herself – where did they come from, why did she get them, how long were they going to stick around? As soon as you started turning over those rocks, you had no choice but to start staring at the grubs and worms and bugs squiggling around underneath them. You couldn’t just unturn the rocks again, no matter how far back in time you traveled, and so she frequently found herself doing the mental equivalent of covering her ears and la-la-la-ing loudly to drown out the sound of her own inner monolog.

She did enjoy Chloe saying she was cool, though.

“Are you creating different timelines just by bringing the photo I took?” Chloe suddenly asked. It was a good question, and Chloe actually looked semi-worried, propped up on an elbow, the top hat now clipped to her skullcap for a Hatception effect.

“I hope not. I don’t know. It’s not like I couldn’t have had a photo in my pocket the whole of last evening. It’s not like I checked. Probably.”

Chloe was wise enough not to comment on that. She just waved a hand in Max’s direction.

“Then take it away, oh Doctor Selfie Who!”

 _What?_ Max looked up from the photo.

“Is that a riff on Victoria’s stupid selfie ho thing?” Max asked, narrowing her eyes at Chloe. “Because, as much as I hate to say it, Victoria does it better.”

“No, Little Miss Vicky just does it meaner. But fine. Take it away, Doctor Max!”

Max took it away, as it were.


	4. Chapter 4

“Are you actually going to take a picture of us in front of every monument in the whole of Vegas?” Chloe complained. But good-naturedly. There might even have been a giggle.

“This is a park bench,” said Max, lowering her camera and making a face at Chloe. “Hardly a monument.”

“Fine. Point taken. But still. This is some _Days of Our Life_ shit and you know it.”

“ _Days of Our Life_ is a soap or something. It’s not a documentary. I don’t think.”

“Didn’t know you were into soaps! I’m sorry if our road trip is making you miss your stories, _Ma_.” Chloe’s laugh was totally stupid and obnoxious. Also totally endearing. For all her blustery toughness, she could be for realz adorable sometimes.

“Big talk for someone who’s still got a whole box of Babysitter’s Club Super Specials in her closet,” Max retorted, totally mangling the pronunciation of ‘Super Specials’ which frankly was a tongue twister at the best of times, right?

Chloe’s cheeks began to color just faintly – as in, Chloe was starting to blush! _Chloe!_ – and she immediately changed the subject.

“I don’t really blame you, camera girl,” she said instead of continuing to rag on Max. “I’m psyched to be here, too. Look!” She showed Max her new tattoo for, what previous-timeline-Max registered, must have been the fifth time. Current-day-Max winced at how swollen and red it looked, but her past self just rolled with it. In fact, her past self was highly enthused.

“And I got a discount! Did I tell you that?” Chloe looked downright smug.

“Yes!” Max said, almost squealed. Why did she do that? Who _was_ this girl, who seemed to think getting a discount on a tattoo was an amazing thing and not seriously disconcerting? It seemed _incredibly_ disconcerting to current day Max.

Max looked at Chloe. No, she stared: it was like her eyes were fixating on her face and she couldn’t look away. It was a weird feeling. She recognized it as one of those drunken moments when everything appeared in flashes, like snapshot after snapshot of some evening you recalled in bits and pieces. But there was another layer to it this time; she was inside herself, sober, part and parcel of the whole thing yet kind of removed. She both felt really fucking smashed and like she was just observing someone acting really fucking smashed. So weird, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it.

But she liked Chloe’s face, so she didn’t mind looking at it, even as she didn’t dare to turn her head away for fear of butterfly effecting the situation. She liked Chloe’s gray eyes, bright and wide, reflecting the lights from cars and from signs. Max would even call them sparkling, maybe, though Chloe would 100% not take that as a compliment if she said it out loud. Her gaze moved along the planes of Chloe’s face, her nose, the angle of her jaw – it was a good jaw. In a totally platonic way, she actually thought Chloe had an excellent jaw. Even her hair looked especially vibrant, super vibrant; bluer, somehow, than even the neon signs surrounding them. Well, not all of the neon signs were blue, obviously. So Max guessed that made some kind of sense.

“Whatcha staring at, drunky?”

Max blinked – Chloe was waving a hand in front of her face.

“Uh, nothing.” Both Maxes, past and present, felt a little dazed.

“You’ll tell me if you need to throw up, right? ‘Cause we should probably find you a trash can or something if you do.”

“No, no. I don’t need to throw up.” Did she? She didn’t. “Do you?”

“Nah. I haven’t thrown up since I was eight.” Max knew for a fact that wasn’t true, ‘cause they’d both had that horrible flu when they were eleven and Chloe had upchucked green Gatorade all over her favorite shirt. But whatever. Apparently she hadn’t pressed the point at the time.

“So where are we going?” Max asked as Chloe stood up from the bench and stretched.

“I don’t know about you, but I want smokes. Need. Let’s find somewhere that sells smokes.”

“Okay. I’ll try a cigarette,” Max said to her own absolute horror. Yeah, she was not sticking around for that. _Gross_. She let Chloe walk ahead of her a little bit. Actually, she stared at her a little bit. The way she moved. Her hips – but why did she do that? Why was she staring? Quickly, before Chloe turned around and yelled at her to hurry, she grabbed her photo back out of her pocket. Holding it flat in her palm, hopefully invisible enough in case Chloe did turn around, she tried to fix her wavering gaze on it for long enough that it’d take her back to the hotel room.

 

\---

 

It worked. She sat straight up, bolt upright, like she was waking from a nightmare.

“What up, Carmen Sandiego?” Chloe called. She sounded very far away, but then she was right there, right in front of Max, looking a little worried. “You look hella freaked out.”

_I feel like I was maybe developing some uncalled for feelings for you last night_ , Max didn’t say.

“I was just about to split a pack of cigarettes with you,” she said instead. “I didn’t want to have to watch myself develop lung cancer in slow motion.”

“God, you’re such a square.” Chloe rolled her eyes, elbowed Max in the ribs. “I’m sure you had, like, half a drag and then started coughing and then vowed never to touch a so-called cancer stick again. If it makes you feel any better.”

“It kind of does.” They looked at each other for a second, and then they burst out laughing.

“I know you so well,” Chloe said, her voice all smug. She folded her hands behind her head and legit smirked at Max.

Max didn’t really know what to do with herself in the face of that smirk. She wasn’t sure what to say. ‘I know you so well, too’? She did – for instance, she’d known, even before she’d spotted the empty bowl on the nightstand, that Chloe would, at some point while Max was away, have gotten hungry enough to eat their gross strawberries. She knew that, if she had, in fact, only smoked half a cigarette before choking, Chloe would both have poked fun at her for ages and been pretty nice about it because she really didn’t want Max to get into the bad habit of smoking. She knew that, if they had actually done something awful last night, Chloe would’ve taken the rap for it if need be – even if just to save Max from getting a semi-dodgy police record. She knew that she liked the way Chloe was smirking at her, but she had no idea what to do with that information.

Trying her best to lodge any sort of thinking firmly in the back of her mind, she looked down at the next picture in her stack, trying not to feel awkward. It wasn’t a very good picture. She was pouting into the camera in a way she never, ever normally would; just looking at it made her feel self-conscious. Her skin was flushed, her forehead shiny. Chloe was just a turquoise blur, turning away. Honestly, she’d rather not look at the picture at all, but of course she had to. So she did: she tuned everything else out and just looked.

 

\---

 

“I still think having a selfie from inside a real life Vegas casino would have been cooler than a selfie from some club,” was the first thing Max said when she arrived through her photo. Her voice sounded surprisingly steady and unslurred at the moment, especially in comparison with her feet. They seemed to have taken on a life of their own.

“Horrible people fill their Instas with club selfies,” she continued. “Like Victoria.”

“This is VooDoo. It is not just any old backwater club in Arcadia Bay, Nowhere. And P.S., if Victoria spends half as much time thinking about you as you think about her, I’d say she’d wants to marry you and have her gross children.” Chloe grinned at Max. “Obsessed much?”

Max didn’t even respond to that, she just flipped Chloe a shaky bird. Chloe’s grin only got wider as she happily flipped one back.

“I may have a fuckton of vices, Super Max, but I am not a gambling woman. Besides, you’re so wasted, you’d just go in and bet everything on black and then we’d have to leave without my car.”

“What?”

“Because you’d bet my car! And I take it back, you’d probably bet it on goddamn yellow.”

“There’s only black and white. I think it is you who is wasted.”

“No, there’s only black and red and that was exactly my point.”

Fine, okay, score one for Chloe. Max was slightly appalled with her past self, although, if she had to be absolutely honest with herself, she probably would have said the colors involved in roulette or whatever were black and white even if she were sober.

Anyway, Chloe clearly wasn’t too sober herself, even though she managed to seem a little less out of it than Max. She’d stridden up to the bar, elbowing her way through the throng, and flipped her hair at the dude behind the counter for no real reason that Max could see. The dude looked none too impressed. Neither did the reluctantly parted crowd.

“Two shots of Fireball and a Dirty Girl Scout for the lady,” Max could hear Chloe request over the pounding music and general annoyance of the rest of the crowd. She quickly managed to get a wad of cash out and was trying to give it to the bartender, but he just shook his head and refused to accept it.

“You’re way too drunk,” Max heard him call. “And probably way too young. Go away, sober up, and I won’t bother asking for your I.D.”

Somewhat shamefaced and definitely pretty uncoordinated in her movements, Chloe slunk away.

“Drunk as a skunk,” Max mumbled on Chloe’s return, feeling her lips twist into a small smirk almost against her will. Chloe faux-punched her in the arm in mock-outrage.

“I’d take offense if that wasn’t dorky as fuck. And I’d make fun of you for it if it wasn’t also insanely cute in its lameness. C’mon, Max. Fuck the booze. Let’s get our thrasher on!” And Chloe left for the dance floor.

Max expected to feel her past awkwardness and revulsion as she followed Chloe to the next room, where the music pounded even louder and the lights strobed colors that seemed to her in her drunken state to be new and exciting, like violet? Who ever knew violet could be so _purple_? So bright and cool? She wasn’t feeling awkward, repulsed, nothing like that. She was surprised: the beat of the bass hit her feet and rose through her body, seeming to vibrate along her every nerve and make her very bone marrow pulse; she physically felt the music more than she actually heard it. In her legs! In her teeth! Somehow she wasn’t apprehensive at all. For once, she wanted to throw herself out in that throng of people and _get her actual thrasher on_ , full on shaka brah style. She didn’t even think she’d do a bad job of it.

Of course she did do a bad job of it. Present Max could see it even if past Max couldn’t. When she threw herself into her ‘cool’ moves, Max wanted to mentally cringe into a little ball. But she was also still really into it. Really, really into it. She grabbed Chloe and they danced together. Not sexy dancing or anything! They were only touching a tiny bit.

Then Bootylicious came on and c’mon: Game over. Max and Chloe had only been kids of seven or eight when it came out, obviously, and already too quote-unquote cool to like the silly mainstream music all the other kids were all about, but Destiny’s Child? Just too catchy, even for their pre-emo, pre-hipster, pre-whatever selves. So they’d both listened to Destiny’s Child in secret for ages and then each of them had realized the other was doing it, and they’d made this pact or whatever that Bootylicious was an officially Captain Chloe and First Mate Max approved song because it had the word ‘booty’ in it. Of course, fast forward twelve years and obviously they realized that the word ‘booty’ in that particular song had no pirate treasure connotations. But it was still a fucking awesome song. Max felt it in every bone in her body. And yeah, it was a song that required some slightly sexier dancing. Butts kind of came into it a lot. Present day Max considered whipping her return photo out of her pocket and getting the hell out of there, but then Chloe was grabbing her right back and the music was pumping, and, well, there wouldn’t be any harm in staying for just one song, right? For the best song in the world, practically. Even if it involved Chloe’s hand on her back and, whoops, dancing really close, and was that Max’s hand sliding down to Chloe’s…?

It was.

 

\---

 

“You’re blushing,” Chloe said when Max blinked her eyes open back in the hotel room. “J’accuse!”

“Don’t you j’accuse me.” Max groaned. The time traveling back and forth was not helping her sore head. Like, at all. Probably her nose would start bleeding soon. “We just went clubbing.” She neglected to fill Chloe in on the circumstances of their dancing, her hand on Chloe’s ass, the way they seemed to be on the verge of actually saying fuck it and starting to make out just as Max decided she needed to get out of there, pronto. If Chloe remembered, she didn’t say anything.

“Did you find anything out about our next destination?”

“No. We’d just arrived and it looked like we were going to be dancing for a while. So I noped out.”

“Good choice. I’m pretty sore, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I did some head banging.” Chloe cricked her neck around.

  
“Didn’t look like a head banging kinda venue, but who knows with you?”

Chloe stuck her tongue out at Max.

“They also had a rooftop pool,” Max felt compelled to tell Chloe. “Maybe you’re sore because you did a few laps.”

“No way! Did I?”

“No clue. Present day Max left the premises, remember? And I have no actual memory of you going skinny dipping, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Chloe sighed.

“Man, I’m so jealous of you getting to do all this again,” she said. “I’m not gonna be able to afford to go back here for years and years. And you’re getting to do it all over again for free!”

Max was about to protest, but actually she’d been having a pretty good time, even if she was just a spectator, really. So she didn’t say anything, just picked up the next photo in the stack.

“Look, this actually is the picture of us in front of a casino! I guess I talked you into it.”

Chloe grabbed the photo back and squinted at it. Though they were definitely crouching inexplicably, the two of them were looking very happy and very touristy in the picture, Caesars Palace looming tall behind them.

“Neat.” Chloe seemed only vaguely interested. Perhaps she was still grudgy about not getting to travel back in time with Max. Or maybe she really wasn’t into gambling. “What, did I not want to go there?”

“Um, I think you just really wanted to dance.” Max once again neglected to let Chloe in on the nature of that dancing. And she absolutely _refused_ to blush. Chloe didn’t appear to notice the way Max’s face was beginning to color despite that refusal, but she did seem suddenly more animated.

“We could have made a killing at the machines! With your time-traveling skillz and all.” Yep, just what Max had been afraid of. “Well, maybe we’re about to. Maybe we _were_ about to? Your time travel shenanigans are not doing _shit_ for my hangover, FYI.”

“Seriously, Chloe? _You’re_ complaining? At least you can just hang out here and raid the mini bar.”

“Oh, there’s a mini bar? Great idea! I do like disgusting peanuts and overpriced Coke.”

“You’re hilarious,” Max intoned. Looking at the picture, she felt vaguely nervous. Maybe they had actually been about to scam a casino out of a ton of money when Max had taken the picture. Hopefully not, though.

“C’mon, Max,” Chloe said, dropping the sarcasm. “It’ll be fine. We’ll find the officiator guy somehow.”

That wasn’t actually what Max was concerned about at the moment, though obviously she should have been. Like, of course she was concerned about it, but…

“We’ll see,” said Max, and tried to bring the photograph into proper focus.

“I’ll save you some disgusting peanuts!” was the last thing she heard Chloe say before she seemed to get sucked into the photo.

 

\---

 

“Aw, c’mon, Chlo!”

“Stop calling me that, _Maxine_.”

“Okay, truce.” Max tried to pull a sulky face, only to find that her facial features weren’t exactly obeying her.

“Truce. But I’m still not going into that casino with you. You got your picture of us in front of the famous columns! Yay! Now we leave.”

“It’s all so cool, though! I want to see what it’s like inside.” It wasn’t even like Max was invested in casinos per se, and she didn’t want to play – well, she probably didn’t want to play, at least. She just wanted a picture of herself looking all James Bond.

“James Bond did not take selfies of himself,” was the only response she got when she voiced that thought.

“That’s just because they hadn’t been invented yet,” Max muttered, mostly to herself. Also, James Bond wasn’t a historical figure, she realized belatedly. He was just some dude writer’s epic power fantasy. Still, she changed tacks.

“C’mon, Chloe. It’s Caesars Palace. We’re in Vegas. We can’t just stand outside like two… losers.”

“Dude, I agree, it’s totally cool. I just don’t think we should be gambling.”

“Seriously? You’re all sex, drugs, and rock and roll! until it comes to gambling, of all things?”

“Yeah, because we’ll just lose valuable booze money, and you know that as well as I do. Unless you had a sudden change of heart and actually want to use your powers to figure out which machines are due payouts and shit like that?”

Max was quiet. Present day Max was pretty proud of her past self for not going for the power thing, because she could feel how it was kind of tempting her.

“Didn’t think so. Let’s go get even more smashed instead, Caulfield! And then we’ll dance and I promise I won’t mock you. Much.”

“Fine! Okay.” Past Max wasn’t so sure she’d enjoy the dancing, though she was apparently looking forward to having a drink or two. Present day Max was at least happy for past Max that she was about to have _such_ a blast busting all the moves or throwing all the shapes or whatever, even if it ended in some butt touching. Maybe _because_ it ended in some butt touching. Oh, God. Max found it difficult enough to sort out her feelings at the best of times. When her present feelings were all tangled up in her past feelings? Mission impossible. Making sure Chloe wasn’t looking at her, Max grabbed her travel photo and stared it into submission.


	5. Chapter 5

There wasn’t actually a comic book-ish whoosh! when Max returned back from the photo, but she really felt like there should have been. She tilted her head up and caught Chloe looking at her expectantly.

“Nothing new,” Max said. “That photo must have been put in the pile out of order, ‘cause all we did was argue about whether we should go to the casino or the club.”

“And I won!”

“And you won. But no new information.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I’ll try to make sure the next one’s right. Gets pretty dull sitting here by myself while you’re zonking out.”

“Yeah, I bet. I guess at least you did make yourself acquainted with the disgusting peanuts.” Chloe, perched cross-legged in one of the armchairs, was surrounded by crinkly shiny plastic wrappers, having clearly eaten her boredom for however long Max had been out cold.

“I did not. I made myself acquainted with knock-off M&Ms. And they were definitely disgusting.”

“But you still ate a full, what, five bags?”

“Like I said! Pretty fucking dull.”

Max bought that. She probably would’ve gotten pretty antsy sitting around waiting for Chloe in the same situation. She also felt like she couldn’t really complain, because she was actually kind of having a blast, headache or no headache. They still had to get something done about the whole marriage thing, she guessed, and obviously Max had to make sure they hadn’t killed or maimed someone, but she was still pretty much enjoying getting to relive the whole evening. That wasn’t a crime! Either way, Chloe would be proud of how calm she was being. And if she wanted to contract food poisoning or something from knock-off M&Ms, who was Max to judge?

Chloe was shuffling through the pictures, making the empty bags rustle around her as she stretched out her legs in front of her and sighed.

“It’s really kind of hard to tell what order these photos should be in, you know,” she told Max, separating out, Max supposed, viable candidates for the next pic.

“I know,” Max said. She was surprised and impressed that Chloe had been able to do it with relative accuracy so far.

“So I was thinking. Can’t you just go back into that one wedding photo? Or would that be too weird for you?” Chloe must have been looking at it while Max was time-traveling because she slipped it out of her pocket to give to Max. Max took it and made herself look at it again, even though taking it all in made her feel hot and red with embarrassment.

“Nope. Don’t think so,” she finally said, swallowing hard. Like she hadn’t considered it. Like it would have actually been that weird kissing Chloe, at this point. “You see how I’m mostly covered by that guy? The Elvis guy. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work. I can try, but, I don’t know. I’m always traveling into myself. I don’t think it works if my face is mostly blocked.”

“But you haven’t—”

“I don’t think it would work,” Max said decisively. She totally wasn’t saying that because she wanted to experience the whole night again. She just… didn’t think it would work. That was it.

“Besides,” she went on, mentally reassuring herself that she was doing the right thing, “we don’t just want to get info on the wedding, right? We want to make sure we didn’t do anything else too awful.”

“I guess. Fair enough.” Chloe wasn’t usually this complacent, but maybe the hangover was making her meeker. Hopefully she wasn’t upset. She didn’t exactly look happy, but Max would just have to roll with it for now. Maybe try to cheer her up later. Not in a weird way. Before she could ask Chloe to make sure she was at least okay, Chloe spoke again: “Try this one?”

She handed Max a photo further down from the almost-depleted pile and gave her a lopsided smile. Max felt more grateful for the smile than the photo, but she grabbed it and gave it the once-over.

It looked like they were inside a bar, but a much dingier bar than the one attached to the nightclub. They did look a bit more disheveled, like maybe they’d just spent the past few hours dancing, so sure, it was worth a shot. This must have been after they’d hit the drug store, too, because Chloe was suddenly sporting her very blue make up, and, holy shit, she was even wearing lipstick, which was so un-Chloe. And that lipstick? It was so, so very smudged. Max had a bad feeling about this. Well, she had a feeling. It was certainly a feeling of some kind.

“See you in a sec,” she told Chloe. She left the premises to the soundtrack of more crinkling and rustling as Chloe curled up in her chair and watched her.

\---

Max blinked into what turned out to be the picture she’d originally been gazing at when Chloe started talking about traveling back. She was clutching a bright red cocktail in a plastic martini glass, the plastic all foggy with scratches and, ew, flecks of dirt. The cocktail was blatantly just Kool-Aid and cheap Swedish vodka, but she’d clearly enjoyed it at the time. She was swigging it back with almost the same frequency and enthusiasm that Chloe dove into her beer.

“Chloe,” she said, beginning to giggle even though she was so not a giggler. “I am so drunk.”

“I know,” Chloe said. “You really are.”

“Hey, so are you!”

“Hell yes!” Chloe tilted her beer stein towards Max in a salute. Max tilted her glass right back, managing to splash about half her cocktail over her bare wrist, wincing at how gross and sugary it felt while not noticing at all how gross and sugary it felt.

On a cursory inspection, though Max was of course tethered to her past self’s point of view and so could only take in so much, the bar seemed to be on about the same level of fancy as the drinks. Meaning, dingy and dusty and kind of gross. Smoke rolled over the premises, but it wasn’t the sort of bar where they’d have the ability to or even interest in keeping a smoke machine, and no one even seemed to be holding cigarettes. It was all very inexplicable. Max didn’t give a single fuck.

Everything was so intense and so bright and so beautiful and so amazing! It couldn’t be just the booze. The way the room was spinning just a bit, that was the booze. The grin that was permanently stretched across her face, probably the booze. But the way she was feeling right now?

She’d been drunk before, not every weekend like certain classmates she could mention, but every now and again, dumb little pseudo-parties with the other dorky girls on her floor of the dorm, actually playing truth or dare even though they were in _high school_. Once Warren had gotten a six pack in and they’d sat all night sipping on what turned out to be really, really gross beer and making progressively more elaborate excuses to each other for not putting on Cannibal Holocaust, even though that had been the stated purpose of getting together. Max knew what tipsy felt like and she knew what drunk felt like, and it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t the booze at all. If she was drunk on anything, she decided, it was Chloe’s presence. Future Max noted that she was also definitely drunk on alcohol but otherwise ceded the point. Everybody liked having their best friend around, right?

Right.

Chloe’s presence – Max reflected on it, bits and pieces of their evening together stretching out in front of her. Chloe’s laugh when Max was stumbling down the street, pulling on her arm to straighten her up again, only for both of them to fall down, clutching each other. Chloe dancing wildly to awful music, slices of her face lit up by strobing lights every now and again, and Max having to try very, very hard not to just stop and gaze at her when it happened. The plume of smoke escaping her lips after a drag on her cigarette. Yeah, cigarettes were gross technology 100%, but those lips. Wowser.

 _What kind of a thing is that to even think about a BFF?_ Max tried to ask herself, tried very, very hard to ask herself, but she knew she wasn’t thinking about Chloe as her BFF just then. Past Max wasn’t, that is. Current Max… she didn’t even know.

“Staring again, Caulfield,” Chloe told her. She slammed her empty beer stein down on the table. It didn’t make a very satisfying noise – like Max’s martini glass, it, too, was apparently made of plastic – and Chloe frowned at it for a second before turning a dazzling grin on Max again. Yeah, Max definitely felt dazzled. To her very core, she felt dazzled.

“I know I’m a babe,” Chloe continued, “but did nobody ever tell you staring is rude?”

“No, I…” Max stuttered, so stupid and lame in her awkwardness, then managed to blurt out an even smoother, “I just love you so much.” Max couldn’t believe herself, drunk or not. To her credit, if you could call it that, her cheeks weren’t flushing and she didn’t try to take it back or laugh it off, even when Chloe quirked an eyebrow at her.

“I know,” she said, cockiness personified. That stat really was maxed out. “You were practically eating me before.”

Max did blush then, as a different type of image started barraging her. Those fucking lips on her own, considerably less amazing, lips. She could almost feel the fabric of Chloe’s tank scrunched up in her fist as she remembered pulling Chloe close, kissing her hard, desperately, kissing her in a way either Past Max or Present Max didn’t even know she knew how to kiss, all lips and hands and actual moans. Practically pawing at Chloe, running her fingers across Chloe’s lower back, over the tank then under the tank. It was as though she could hear Chloe’s little chuckle – no, she could feel it against her mouth – as she relived Chloe kissing her back, but way more tentative, her fingers getting tangled in Max’s hair. Max must have initiated. Yeah, she realized, plumbing the depths of her booze-sodden mind, she had definitely initiated. Had Chloe not been into it?

“I’m sorry,” she began, so horribly, horribly awkward, but Chloe stopped her.

“I don’t blame you. Who wouldn’t?”

But Max couldn’t make herself look any less crestfallen, no matter how hard she tried. What if Chloe had actually not liked it? What if she’d only sort of reciprocated because she had to get Max off her back somehow? Present day Max didn’t know, either! Yeah, Chloe had been somewhat more chill about their accidental marriage, but that didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to be with Max for realz. Not that Max – wow, she didn’t even know anymore.

“I love you, too, Max,” Chloe said finally, having carefully studied Max’s face for a while, probably terrified she was going to burst into tears or something. “You know that, right?” She kind of tripped over the words as she said them, but she didn’t sound insincere at all.

“I love you, too,” Max gulped – gulped? Chloe was merciful enough not to tease her, either for gulping or for the redundancy of it all. Maybe she didn’t even notice it.

“Thanks, Max,” she said instead. She reached out and squeezed Max’s hand, knocking the beer stein over. It rolled off the table down onto the floor where it was presumably lost in the creepy smoke covering the ground, but Max didn’t care and Chloe didn’t care either, apparently. 

They sat looking at each other for what was probably a full minute. It really was just like being drunk, but on like super high quality liquors and stuff, not whatever awful swill they had actually been pouring down their throats. It wasn’t like Max spent a lot of time around high quality liquors, but she thought it was a decent simile, although Chloe-drunk was probably superior to high-quality-liquor-drunk, as well.

She took in Chloe’s entire person; she tried to reconcile her with the girl she had been before Max had left Arcadia Bay and ditched her past life. If they had been together all that time, grown up together, Chloe would have changed so incrementally that Max wouldn’t even have paid attention to all the differences, the way you generally don’t with people with spend all your time around. But now?

The turquoise hair was a gimme. The tough-as-nails clothes and accessories, even the way she’d kept shooting up taller while Max had stalled somewhere around 5’3”, all those things were obvious changes, things anyone would have been able to point out.

But Max noticed other things, too. For instance – it was just a small, unimportant, dumb little thing – she noticed that Chloe had grown into her hands and feet, which used to be way large for her body as a skinny little kid. Her hands were still pretty big in comparison to Max’s tiny hands, but they fit perfectly with the rest of her body and actually looked really elegant with their long fingers, chipped black nail polish and all. Her skin was clearer than it used to be. In fact, it was the kind of clear that Max (who still got the occasional pimple even though she was over eighteen and felt like her pimple days would have been behind her in a fairer world) would really envy in most people. She was pretty okay with Chloe being dealt that card, though. Yeah, Chloe’s cheeks were currently dusted with blue eyeshadow as improvised blusher from when Max had given her the impromptu blue-themed makeover in a drugstore bathroom just before they hit the bar. Not a conventional look, but one that, somehow, did not make her skin look any less beautiful.

Her neck, Max noted, was sort of _finer_ , too: slimmer and longer and creamier-looking, like it would totally be at home dripping with jewels in some vintage painting or other. It wasn’t the sort of thing other people would notice or care about, probably. Who gave a damn about the way someone’s neck looked? Maybe it was Max’s eye for photography that did it, or maybe it was just that it was _Chloe_ ’s neck, because it wasn’t like she spent a huge chunk of her time being a neck fetishizer normally.

The shape of Chloe’s smile was the same and her bone structure was the same – well, of course it was – but it was like she’d stepped out of this goofy kid costume that she’d used to wear and turned into this sort of ravishing beauty, not to sound too corny or anything. Max feared that she was still, personally and maybe permanently, stuck in goofy kid mode. Chloe, though, had become so _elongated_ and, yes, a total babe. Was ‘elongated’ a weird thing to call someone? Chloe had been the prettier of the two back when they were thirteen-ish as well, Max had always thought, but no thirteen-year-old could ever be beautiful like this. Total impossibility. Not that thirteen-year-olds were ever… Max felt like her brain was rolling around in her skull. She blinked very slowly to try to regain some semblance of control, but it didn’t do much. Except for making her look drunker than ever, probably. Certainly Chloe was looking at her a little strangely when she opened her eyes again.

It bothered Max a little that she did notice all those changes. It seemed like such a concession to the fact that she’d skipped town for so long. It also, to Max of the future, seemed an obvious concession to a bunch of changing feelings about Chloe, and the strange thing was she couldn’t decide if it was just down to the drink or what. She really, honestly couldn’t tease out her present day feelings from yesterday’s feelings. It was kind of like working with transparencies, even though she didn’t do that too often anymore since she mostly wielded her Polaroid camera and didn’t have to mess around developing photographs. But she’d still done it in the past, gazing through flimsy strips of negatives and slides, superimposing one photo over another. The way being privy to her past emotions and thoughts while still having free rein of her present, future, whatever emotions and thoughts felt like that, like two transparencies on top of each other, and she was beginning to have a hard time discerning which emotions belonged to which Max. She was starting to get a creeping suspicion that her past feelings and present feelings were, in fact, really similar. Maybe they were even the same. For someone so given to inner soliloquys and self-analysis, Max thought glumly, she sure wasn’t getting anywhere much.

Chloe didn’t make fun of her for staring this time. Max supposed that, after all these years, she was pretty used to Max’s mind working overtime. Besides, Chloe was looking back at her. Not staring, just kind of gazing at her, head tilted to one side and rested against her hand.

“More drinks?” Max asked, groping for something to say, trying to come off jauntier than she ultimately felt.

“More drinks,” Chloe confirmed. She sounded relieved to be talking again. Max supposed sitting around silently looking at each other was a weird way to spend a night out. So why did she want to do it so badly?

“My round,” Max said, because it seemed like the thing to say. She shuffled off her bar stool, which, she dimly noted, had apparently gotten super tall during the twenty minutes she’d been sitting on it.

“Beer,” Chloe said, grinning that lopsided grin that Max had just seen in the future. Who knew that time-traveling would make this disentangling gig so difficult? And who knew you could get so weirdly enchanted by just a lopsided smile?

“And don’t forget your fake credentials.” Chloe said it pretty loudly, louder than she must have intended to, because she slapped a hand over her mouth and started glancing around, checking if anyone had heard. Max tried not to laugh ‘cause surely that would just bring more attention to their illicit situation, not, she thought, that anybody in this particular place would be likely to care very much. Still, she grabbed the ID Chloe slid across the table and took a couple of stumbling steps across to the bar.

The bar man definitely hadn’t heard Chloe, or definitely wasn’t bothered, at least. He was just staring off into space – apparently it was a night for staring. For a second or two, Max just fidgeted on the spot, well aware that Chloe was watching with amusement. Chloe would just have demanded the bar dude’s attention, Max knew. She was great like that. Finally, Max coughed semi-loudly, annoyed with her own timorousness.

“A vodka cranberry,” she said when the man turned to her with a look on his face like he was deeply resenting her interrupting his little reverie. Like, it’s your _job_ , dude, Future Max wanted to tell him. At least he seemed to give not a single fuck about her age.

“Coming up,” he muttered and turned away again before Max could finish her order.

“No, wait! Hey!” Max heard herself cry. Apparently, she could get pretty noisy if it was for Chloe’s benefit. The bar man sent her another (frankly unprofessional) resentful look over his shoulder.

“A beer, too. One of your _best_ beers.” Neither Max of the future nor Max of the past knew what she meant by that, really, but if anyone deserved a fuck-off, fifteen-dollar beer in an actual bottle, it was Chloe. Both Maxes felt that very strongly. Bar man heaved a sigh that seemed to come all the way down from the bottom of his shoes and started assembling their drink orders. Max peeked back at Chloe while he was at it; Chloe gave her a thumbs up.

“So what are we gonna do now?” Chloe said when Max reached her again, gross red drink in one hand and actual glass bottle of fifteen-dollar, fuck-off beer in the other. “We’ve done the tattoo…” She flexed her arm and smiled down at the already kind of jacked up bandage. “We’ve done the requisite drunk makeover montage…”

Max was impressed that Chloe could make her mouth say ‘requisite.’ Max was pretty sure she wouldn’t even be able to spell it.

“We’ve done the ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it,’” Chloe went on, smirking at Max.

“That’s not what it was,” Future Max heard her past self protest. She wasn’t sure what her objection was. Past Max kind of couldn’t put her finger on it, either. It was just this nebulous thing in the pit of her stomach.

“If you say so, Katy Perry.” All at once, Max realized what her problem was: it was the notion of experimentation. Like she was just getting drunk and making out with girls for male attention or something, _gross_. If Chloe noticed Max’s total and absolute rejection of that concept, she didn’t let on.

“Anyway, we’ve done the clubbing,” she continued. “Although I can’t believe you didn’t let me go swimming. It’s not like we haven’t done worse things in the search for pool parties.”

“You didn’t have a bikini,” Max grumbled. “You can swim in your underwear or whatever when we break into Blackwell. Probably not at an actual club with actual people.”

“Skinny dip?”

Max couldn’t let herself think about that.

“C’mon,” she rallied, desperate for something to say that would take her mind off of the idea of skinny dipping. “There has to be something we can do that we haven’t done yet. The night is still young, right?” Max had no idea what time it was, but the ridiculous darkness of the bar made her feel like it for sure couldn’t be morning.

“I don’t know. Strip clubs, toking up in the car…” Chloe smiled at Max as she shook her head almost instinctually. She could have rolled with getting stoned, but she realized, thank God, that it was probably a bad idea. She could have rolled with a strip club, too, but it was kind of like… she wouldn’t have minded, and she didn’t have anything against strippers or naked women or anything like that.

Actually, she decided as the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach came roaring back, she couldn’t have rolled with a strip club. She really didn’t want to go. And it definitely wasn’t to do with her being a square or a downer about the sex industry.

It was just – she totally realized it for realz, lightbulb moment, that kind of thing, and she couldn’t protect herself from that realization – that random stripper Destiny or whoever was not actually the naked woman she was interested in seeing. Which, just, _oh man_. She felt totally helpless. How could she have let herself feel this way? When did she start letting herself feel this way? It was like she’d felt this way forever; try as she might, she couldn’t think of a moment when the metaphorical switch had been flipped.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Chloe said, throwing her beer back. Max hadn’t even touched her drink. “I won’t corrupt you. No hookers and blow, okay?

“Actually,” she went on, “you know what I want to do? That we haven’t done all night?”

“No?” Max said in a tiny voice, trying to decide whether she was happy about her realization or just plain scared. Max of the Future for sure was petrified. Not because she doubted her feelings, exactly – no, she actually didn’t doubt them at all. But Chloe was clearly not into her like that, and this night had ended in _marriage_. What had she done? 

“Eat something,” Chloe said. “I’m hella hungry. What say you we find ourselves some grub?”

“Grub sounds good.” Grub was tangible. Max wouldn’t have to think about anything at all while shoving food into her mouth.

Max hadn’t even touched her drink by the time Chloe took her last swig. She didn’t really care about the stupid thing, even though Chloe, she knew, would be more than happy to wait for her while she drank it. She stared into the glass – that shade of red was positively lurid; there really was no way whatever was in the glass had so much as ever _seen_ a cranberry – but she decided to just leave it. She wanted to be lucid. Well, she wasn’t going to be _lucid_ , exactly; drunk or not, she realized that much. Lucidity – was that a word? Should it be lucidness? – was kind of off the table at this point. All she knew was she didn’t want to cloud these feelings, these brand-new feelings that had been around forever, these feelings that felt big and kind of scary and so insanely utterly important.

Future Max wasn’t exactly protesting. Whatever that entailed.

“You and your inner monologs,” Chloe half-laughed, waving at Max, trying to catch her attention. She’d slid off the bar stool and was standing across from Max, seemingly a little impatient for a burger or something. “You’re staring down that thing like the secret of eternal life or some bullshit is hidden at the bottom. Spoiler alert: it’s just shitty Kool-Aid. Probably not even name-brand Kool-Aid. Probably Flavor-Aid like, you know, those weird cult suicide people.”

Weird cult suicide people? At least that roused Max from her stupor, even though Chloe was clearly just saying words.

“Let’s roll, Mad Max. And don’t forget your bag.”

Max shrugged her satchel onto her shoulder – she probably would actually have left it behind if she hadn’t been prompted – but she still didn’t budge from her stool, even as Chloe started walking away, expecting her to follow.

“Chloe,” she called, and Chloe stopped and looked back at her. Chloe stopped and looked back and suddenly Max felt like her eyes were locking with Chloe’s, like she was frozen in the beam of Chloe’s gray gaze, like there was this overwhelming connection between them and it was kind of a huge deal even as she tried, and Future Max tried, to be all hipsterish and ironically detached from the whole thing.

“Max?” Chloe asked, turning around and taking a few steps closer. She didn’t break eye contact, but she was beginning to look concerned. Max probably had the weirdest look on her face.

“I don’t love you,” Max said and immediately tried to recant because _that was not what she meant to say at all._ Future Max felt like her fucking heart was breaking; how _could_ she?

Chloe looked – what? Shocked? Upset? Max just started babbling.

“No, I mean, I do love you. Chloe, I love you. You are my best friend and I love you.” She was on the verge of crying, her eyes burning like acid.

“I…” Chloe began, then trailed off, voice uncertain.

“I love you, but…” Max wanted to take a deep breath so badly, but it was like her lungs weren’t cooperating. She felt light-headed, like all the oxygen had been sucked out not just of her lungs but of the entire room.

“I love you, Chloe, but not like that. I mean, I love you, but that’s not what I meant to say, I guess.”

Chloe suddenly looked in equal parts confused and sad and why was it impossible for Max to say just what she meant? Was it the booze or was she having an epic meltdown or was she just, like, emotionally weird?

“I mean I’m _in_ love with you,” Max finally managed, and that was more or less what she’d wanted to say all along. “I’m in love with you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She felt like she wasn’t even in control of herself on any level, past or present, as she surreptitiously slid a corner of her traveling photo out of her pocket and threw herself into it, body and mind. She didn’t want to have to look up and see the look on Chloe’s face, because she was pretty sure Chloe hadn’t wanted to hear what she’d just said. Yeah, she joked about stuff like vibrating beds and maybe she had slipped Max some tongue when Max initiated the make out sesh, but that meant nothing, really. Chloe joked a lot. She was open to some tongue action, probably. It didn’t mean she wanted to hear a fucking confession of _love._

“Max. Come here,” she thought she heard Chloe say as the past started slipping out of her hands, but she was pretty sure she was just projecting and it wasn’t like she could go back and check.

\---

“Oh, man,” Max groaned, feeling completely awful. This time it wasn’t just that time-traveling left her reeling from a vague sense of motion sickness and a bunch of pains and aches. No, this time she was also embarrassed, so fucking embarrassed for all Maxes past and present and future. She just wanted to curl into a ball of cringe, cringe, cringe and never have to look a normal person with normal feelings and normal ways of behaving in the eye ever again.

“You okay, Max?” Chloe was sitting right next to her. She had been keeping a hand on Max’s shoulder, apparently; the touch of her palm felt like a brand. It made Max want to cry for way too many reasons.

She tried to stabilize herself. She couldn’t make this weirder than it already was. She just couldn’t.

“Hey Chloe, you really don’t remember anything from last night, right? Like, really really.”

“Uh, nope. Believe I already told you that.”

“No, uh, strange confession or anything?”

Chloe looked at her with undisguised glee.

“Confession? Holy shit, did we actually kill someone? I mean, did _you_? Well, well, well, Caulfield! I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Max didn’t consider this a joke, obviously, but she guessed she was happy Chloe was treating it as one. She tried to laugh along.

“Yeah, no, never mind,” she said. “Nothing too weird’s been going on.”

“So the confession thing? Just your Catholic guilt rearing its ugly head?”

“It’s very that,” Max said curtly, just trying to wrap up the conversation, even though Chloe totally wouldn’t believe she was actually Catholic. At least she didn’t bother calling her on it. Instead she shot Max a measured glance and began stretching, the time she spent in the chair clearly beginning to take its toll on her joints. The way she moved had an effect on her above-tank-top-situation that was, um, not at all unpleasant or unbecoming. Max had to forcibly look away – no matter what she felt about Chloe, or women, or the world at large, she couldn’t sit around staring at someone’s tits like a weirdo. She tried to fasten her gaze on something else. Anything else. Above the mini fridge hung an entirely hideous painting of a sheep wearing a fancy hat. That seemed pretty safe, if mildly terrifying in its own way.

“My eyes are up here, perv!” came Chloe’s voice. Max physically started.

“What?” she sputtered, feeling her face go from freckly-pale to crimson in point two seconds. She wasn’t even looking in Chloe’s direction!

“Kidding, Max. Jeez. Jumpy much? Here. Look at the photos instead of communing with that sheep.”

“How did you even…?” The painting was behind Chloe. Was she _psychic_? And, if so, what kind of incriminating thoughts was she currently reading?

“Max. I’ve been sitting here for hours while you’ve been fucking around in our past. I know every ugly painting and every stupid bowl of dried flower crap in this godawful room. Focus.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Just a few pictures left now. Let’s do this and then you can do whatever you gotta do with the chapel people and then we can go out and get something to eat. I am starving, Max. There’s not even a room service menu. So stop being weird and go end this thing.”

The churning in Max’s stomach wasn’t from the idea of food this time around. She felt not just queasy but downright bilious. Chloe’s voice sounded way too breezy for comfort, and the photo she tossed Max’s way most emphatically didn’t help matters. Chloe wasn’t in it – maybe she’d taken the photo? – but Max’s face filled the picture. She looked not just startled, but distressed; her eyebrows knitted together, her mouth thin and sad like a slash across her face.

She still needed to do it, though. She needed to go inside that picture and face Chloe, face whatever Chloe had to say: that she wasn’t in love with Max, such a shame, but maybe they could still get married for the lolz if it would make Max feel better! Or, worse, that she had been totally grossed out by Max’s declaration but that she would try to overlook it… and then, a couple of hours later, Max somehow actually talking her into getting married for some horrifying reason and through horrifying means, maybe by getting her even drunker until she was too blotto not to agree. Or blackmail? Max didn’t think she was capable of that kind of thing, but who knew. It could be so many awful, awful things.

“Max?”

Steeling herself, Max squared her shoulders and flattened the picture out on the coffee table in front of her. She tried her best to focus.


	6. Chapter 6

Flash!

Even as Max arrived at the scene, she was squinting into the light of the camera bursting out of the darkness of the street. Chloe was holding it and pointing it at Max, pressing the shutter release hard like she was shooting a gun, not even looking into the viewfinder. Of course there was no bullet, just a picture that Chloe didn’t so much as bother taking out of the slot as the camera fed it out. Still, Max was stopped cold in her tracks. Had she been running? It felt like she had. Her heart was beating so hard it felt like it was straining to burst out of her chest, like it was a gross Resident Evil monster or something. 

“What are you doing?” she asked, not that it wasn’t fairly obvious. Only her torso was turned toward Chloe – she’d definitely been jolting away – but as Chloe lowered the camera, Max took a deep breath and actually faced her properly, trying to shield herself by crossing her arms over her stomach. 

“Stop running away,” Chloe said. “You’re obliterated. You don’t even have a ride.” Her eyes were blazing; her lips were taut and thin like a stretched rubber band. 

“Where did you get my camera?” Clearly Past Max had decided asking pointless questions was a better strategy than actually confronting anything. It wasn’t like Future Max had a better suggestion in mind. 

“When you beat it and it fell out of your fucking bag in the bar. You’re welcome, by the way.” 

Max sank down on the sidewalk to the very vocal disgust of a bunch of revelers trying to make their way past. Some slunk around her like a river rushing around a rock and some almost stumbled over her, like watching where they were walking was such a goddamn impossibility. “Fucking tourist,” someone snarled her way. Yeah, like they weren’t basically all tourists here in Las _Vegas._

“You can’t sit there. Come with me.” Chloe still didn’t sound best pleased with her, but Max let her take her by the elbow and pull her up, none too gently, and lead her to a bench flanked by two streetlights, one bright and one broken. As Chloe plunked her down on the bench, Max just looked up at those streetlights. This was the site where her heart was breaking. The light of the functioning lamp seemed to burn its imprint on her retina. Here, between two streetlights, she’d get her heart broken and she was pretty sure she’d never recover, now that she knew about it. Future Max was beginning to wish she’d never gone traveling back like this. At least then this would have been erased from her memories. Maybe she’d still feel it – a twinge here and there, an incomprehensible flashback – but she wouldn’t have known for sure what it was about. 

While Max was studying the lamps looming over them, Chloe was studying Max, standing just in front of her, arms crossed over her chest. 

“You’re an idiot,” she said when Max finally met her eye. Max felt pretty aware of that fact. 

“No,” she went on when Max just nodded mutely. “You’re being an idiot, Caulfield. Do you just spend all your time inside your head? Like, do you never even pay attention to what other people are doing? Or feeling?” 

Max could’ve contested that. She felt like she spent pretty much all her time worrying endlessly about what other people were doing and feeling. She also felt like she owed it to Chloe to just shut up and let her talk a while. 

“I mean, yeah, sure, you root around in the trash cans of cheerleaders for pregnancy tests – and can I just say that’s kind of gross? – and time travel back so you can, I don’t know, be all empathetic and offer advice or baby clinic phone numbers or what the fuck ever.” 

How could Max even react to that? What did Chloe want her to say? She couldn’t think of a single word. 

“Okay, sorry,” Chloe said, seeming to soften when just Max stared at her, wide-eyed. “I know you want to help your friends. That’s great. Really. But sometimes it’s like you think so much and worry so much about how to please everyone that you don’t even have time to live.” 

Max still didn’t know how to respond. Maybe what Chloe was saying rang a little bit true, but what did Chloe want her to do about it? Apologize? Stop using her powers? 

“You can’t fix everything. And you shouldn’t have to. Look, never mind.” Chloe shook her head. 

“No. Go on.” In truth, Max wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it, but she was sure she wanted Chloe to be able to feel like she could say it. It wasn’t like Chloe to mince her words, not really, and it distressed Max to think that maybe she’d been seething and storing up all this stuff she couldn’t even begin to tell Max unless bolstered by like two full bottles of tequila. 

“It’s just,” Chloe said and came closer, just a little bit. “It’s just, how can you say you love me and then bolt like that?” 

“Chloe, I’m sorry,” Max began again, but Chloe cut her off. 

“Stop apologizing. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, you have to be either blind or stupid if you think I don’t love you. And I don’t think you’re stupid, Max. 

“In every way,” she said when Max opened her mouth. “I love you in every way. Okay? Since you seem to need it in writing or something. I would, like, marry you. I’d marry you today! Happily! I love you like that. How could you even think otherwise?” She was beginning to look annoyed again. “I’ve loved you forever. I loved you before you ever even bailed on Arcadia Bay.” 

“Really?” Max asked, trying not let the booze dissolve her words, hardly daring to believe her own ears. “Like, for sure? You’re in…”

“Yes, really, for realz! For sure, you freaking idiot. I’ll shout it from the rooftops, if it’ll help you get it. I’m hella in love with you, Max Caulfield. So in love.” 

Then, finally, Max did know what to do. She grabbed Chloe’s arm, she pulled her closer, closer still until she was sort of straddling Max’s legs, Max still sitting down. Chloe’s beautiful face loomed over her just like the streetlights, and her heart wasn’t breaking, it wasn’t breaking at all. With another pull on her arm, Chloe collapsed into Max’s lap, and Max stretched her entire body, arching her back, and crushed her lips against Chloe’s. 

A dudebro voice whooped from somewhere behind them; Chloe gave him the finger without missing a beat, resting her other hand almost daintily on Max’s shoulder as she parted her lips, all tender and soft against Max’s. 

Max wasn’t so gentle. The way she did this, the way she knew how to do it, it wasn’t just down to having done it before. It wasn’t like she had a ton of experience making out anyway – who would she have been with at the cesspit of lunatics that was Blackwell? It also wasn’t just down to having done it _before_ -before, in her same body but yesterday. Nope, this one kiss felt like it was fated, inscribed in the stars above long ago; of course she knew exactly what to do. She knew to put her hand on Chloe’s waist, bringing her down closer, deeper into their kiss. She knew when to open her mouth, she knew when to let herself taste Chloe, tongue slipping into her mouth, teeth not even clacking together because she knew what to do that well. 

Chloe’s movements and gestures were just as seamless, just as fluid. The hand she slid round the back of Max’s neck, the fingers threaded into Max’s choppy hair: Chloe knew exactly what she was doing, and Max didn’t think it was only because she was more experienced kissing boys and girls. There was something more there. Max thought this must have been part of them forever. 

And fireworks. Max wasn’t totally sure if there were literal fireworks exploding or just metaphorical ones: in Vegas, surely it could go either way. Either way, she felt them, she really did, just like it’d be explained in a shitty YA novel: the sparkling lights raining down in front of her shut eyes; the pounding in her head or her heart that drowned out even the most obnoxious of scattered voices and whistles cheering them on. It seemed like the kind of thing that was just too cliché to exist. But, thought Max, all starry-eyed, all consumed with something she’d never even thought she could feel, it really did exist. 

Finally – in another cliché taken straight out of a teenie romance, Max had no idea whether they’d been kissing for minutes or, like, hours – Chloe pulled back. Max opened her eyes and watched her as she swung her leg over Max’s and sunk down on the bench. They sat next to each other, staring across the street at a fancy-ish nightclub with a super ostentatious scarlet velvet rope guarded by a super ostentatious bouncer, big and beefy and smug-looking. Every time he deigned to unhook the rope and swing the big doors open, you could see bottles of alcohol in all the colors of the rainbow glinting like jewels in Ali Baba’s cave. It was an arresting, no, a fucking glorious sight. But then, maybe it just felt like that because, right now, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. 

“Maybe we should go somewhere,” Chloe breathed. “I don’t,” she clarified when Max felt her cheeks growing scarlet, “mean to, you know. _Do_ stuff. Just to cool off.” 

It was true Max was probably in dire need of cooling off. She was immensely thankful that hadn’t been born with a penis, because this was definitely boner territory. 

Besides, groups of very drunken and rowdy dudes had kind of descended on them, like they were waiting for Max and Chloe’s next move or like they had placed a bet on them or something. It wasn’t like Max felt threatened, exactly, but she also didn’t feel like this was maybe the best time and place for making out. 

“Yeah. That sounds like a good idea.” Max could hear her voice warbling, but at least Chloe was looking similarly affected by this whole thing, and her voice was rougher, huskier than normal when she once more suggested a bite to eat. 

“’Cause I’m totes still starving,” she said, smiling at Max. “What do you say, girlfriend?” 

“I’ll say anything you want,” Max said most quietly, “if you call me that again.” 

“Call you what? Girlfriend?” 

Max nodded, still a little shy. Chloe’s smile stretched to Cheshire Cat-like proportions. 

“Let’s go grab some food, girlfriend.” She stood up and pulled Max with her; she wrapped her arm around Max’s shoulders. It felt like the most natural thing in the world for Max to wrap her own arm around Chloe’s lower back, landing her hand on her waist and sort of cradling it. They leaned into each other as much as they possibly could while still being able to walk. 

Before they could get very far down the street, a headache, striking like a lightning bolt, started to throb in the corners of Max’s mind. She thought she might be able to ignore it – she didn’t want to leave Chloe here, not in this moment – but then the telltale tingle auguring a nosebleed began shooting through her sinuses. Yeah, she needed to get the hell outta Dodge before her bleeding nose accidentally split the timeline. At least Chloe wasn’t looking at her. In fact, Chloe was checking around for decent-looking eateries with a look on her face that was actively blissful. Max’s heart swelled. 

“Love you so much,” Max whispered just as she began traveling. It was weird and dumb considering Max was still hanging out, very much in love, in Chloe’s time. Still, stupid as it was, she didn’t want to leave Chloe without that final declaration. 

\---

“Max! What happened?” 

“What? What do you mean?” 

“Uh, you’re pale as fuck. And shaking. I know you haven’t checked out the mirror yet, but you kinda look like you’ve been through hell and back.” 

Maybe she did, but if so, she sure didn’t feel like it. If anything, she felt like she’d been through heaven. And not necessarily back. 

For some reason, though, Max wasn’t sure she wanted to bring up their love. Because one thing she knew: they were in love. Over the years, she’d probably realized it and not realized it. Mostly not, because who didn’t get occasionally weird about their BFF? It had always seemed like a normal thing to Max; certainly not something that was indicative of even having a crush, never mind being in love. 

This wasn’t Max being occasionally weird about her BFF, though. This wasn’t a crush, soon to be replaced by other crushes. It was love, all-consuming and total. It wasn’t, like, a teenager thing. Max knew it was completely real. 

But Max’s problem – Max’s selfish-ass problem – was that she was no longer sure she actually wanted to get the marriage to Chloe annulled. Like, she would still go through with it for Chloe’s sake! But for some reason, marriage didn’t seem like such a bad idea anymore. Who cared if they’d done it in Las Vegas? Lots of people went to Vegas to elope. There were probs statistics saying most Americans did it, even! Max was pretty sure it was a totally legit, A+ place to get married. 

But of course she was coming at it from the vantage point of having experienced almost their entire night together, even if she hadn’t seen the wedding itself. Chloe had basically no memories of that night, and so of course she’d want to get the marriage annulled. It would be creepy and wrong of Max to stand in the way of that. Well, obviously it would. She would follow this through and end the marriage. Anything else would be the dickest of dick moves. She would never do that to Chloe. 

All around, though, it’d be easier not to bring anything re: marriage or re: love everlasting up at all, really, so Max didn’t say anything much, except that she felt a little woozy but mostly fine and that Chloe didn’t need to worry. 

“Well,” Chloe said, still looking definitely worried, “at least there’s only one pic left. You think you can do that without wrecking your entire head?” 

“For sure,” Max said and tried not to think about the last time they’d said those words. 

“You’re a trooper. Seriousfax. Super proud of you, Max. You are a total boss.” 

Even just the compliment made Max perk up. All of a sudden, she ceased to feel at all hungover or headachey or even like her nose was about to rev up its blood-gushing thing. She also felt unexpectedly confident that she would be able to finish this little mission of theirs without, like, bursting into tears and declaring her love for Chloe all over again. There’d be plenty of time for that after the marriage was over and done with. She picked up the final photo from the table. They appeared to be in a McDonald’s. At least Max was. A gigantic Ronald McDonald statue towered over her, the flash making the plastic shine. 

“Wow, this truly is one for the photo albums.” She showed it to Chloe, who laughed. 

“Don’t even pretend you haven’t always wanted a picture of yourself with Ronald McDonald,” she teased. “Best clown ever, am I right?” 

“You mean ‘worst clown ever’ and also you clearly have never read Stephen King.” 

“I do mean ‘best clown ever’ because, as far as I’m aware, no other clown is associated with cheeseburgers and fries. Take that, Stephen King!” 

“Touché. And I guess it could be worse,” Max had to agree. “It could be one of those weird politician-with-baby photo ops with the mayor. I’d rather have a picture with a clown, any clown, that that.” 

“Yep, there’s your bright side. Atta girl. I’ll see you soon.” Chloe sauntered – yep, it was definitely a saunter – across the room, where she settled down on the probably-vibrating bed. Max laid down next to her, not close enough that it could have seemed weird but close enough that the body heat Chloe was emitting was making her feel things. She held the snapshot up in front of her and squinted. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading this and for leaving such lovely comments and kudos. It makes my day. ♥ I'm really sorry I've been taking a little longer between updates than I'd originally intended. My dog just passed away and it's a little ridiculous how difficult it's been for me to deal. It'll get better, though, I assume, and I will definitely finish this fic. Just... maybe not in as timely a manner as I had planned. So I apologize for that.


	7. Chapter 7

Chloe had apparently been the one to take the picture of Max alongside the gigantic shiny clown. Actually, it seemed like the restaurant had provided the statue precisely for the slightly creepy purpose of people taking pictures with it. At least, Max supposed, it wasn’t a live actor or anything, but she would still have preferred a statue of one of the other Happy Meal gang dudes. Grimace or Hamburglar or something. Were there any McDonalds ladies? Drunk Max couldn’t recall any; sober Max was surprised she could recall any McDonalds peeps at all.

“You happy now?” Max heard herself pretend to complain.

“Sort of.” Chloe was vigorously shaking the picture Max had just traveled through. Max had to admire her wrist muscles: flicking game on point. She tried not to think about how that had come into being and/or its other applications, though, because some thoughts were just not really McDonalds appropriate.

“Sort of?”

“Yeah,” Chloe said, looking down at the photo. “You’re not rocking the cheesy grin I would’ve wanted you to rock. Ideally. But it’ll still be good for blackmail purposes, I’m sure.” She shot Max a cheesy grin of her own.

“Blackmail purposes? Really?” Max laughed. “Who are you going to blackmail, me or the clown? Or just the restaurant?”

“Uh, it can be two things. Also, this is hardly a restaurant, Max. It’s not Red Lobster.”

Secretly, Max thought Red Lobster wasn’t much of a restaurant, either, but she let it slide. Instead of being a dick or a snob about it, she tried for what she hazily and naively hoped was a leerish smirk but not like a gross leer and said, “Well, whatever. I let you take a picture of me with that thing. I think that’s worth a kiss.” Max was pleased with how bold she was being. Chloe wasn’t the only one who could blackmail! If you could call it that. Yeah, you totally couldn’t. Which was good. Because she could deal with blackmailing Frank or Madsen or something, but she never wanted to hurt Chloe, even jokingly.

But Chloe seemed pleased.

“You can have as many kisses as you want, stud. But maybe after dinner. I need something to eat. Like ten burgers. Otherwise all the alcohol might consume me from within.”

It sounded sensible enough to Max, even though the very thought of food was, in the past more than the future now, beginning to make her stomach turn. She slouched back, her head beginning to roll all dizzy as she slid into a booth. Chloe was headed towards the counter. Soon enough, she was elbows-deep into a conversation with the surprisingly animated cashier. From what Max could overhear from her vantage place, it seemed like Chloe was ordering one, if not two, of everything on the menu. Future Max felt vaguely concerned about how she was planning on paying for all of those things, but since Past Max didn’t feel too worried, it was probs fine. Not like you could dine and dash at a McDonalds.

“And those chicken things,” Chloe was saying, pointing. “No, the sandwich, burger things. But with no lettuce, just sauce. Maybe pickles. Yeah, totes pickles. What kind of sauces do you have?”

Whatever the cashier responded – Max couldn’t hear that well from where she was sitting – it made Chloe cock her head in apparent thought.

“Okay. Can you mix more than one sauce on the same burger?”

At that, Max’s stomach lurched for sure. And the air felt like it was just, like, packed with onion rings. It definitely smelled like it – like if you held up a napkin, it would just go all transparent with all the grease that seemed to be undulating in the very atmosphere of the place. It was, in so many ways, not great. Honestly, she’d rather take her chances with being consumed by the alcohol.

Since she didn’t want to wreck the rest of their night – their first night as girlfriends! Max still felt blind-sided by how lucky she was – by vomiting all over everything, she decided to get as far away from the counter as she could without physically leaving the building. She started striding back into the semi-secluded lobby of the place, back towards her old friend Ronald McD.

Even though the whole room seemed turgid with grease, though, Max stopped one last time and just stood looking at Chloe like a total weirdo. She’d been spending a lot of the night gazing, she thought, even before she’d started entirely acknowledging to herself just why she was gazing so much. Maybe that was dumb, but it was like she couldn’t see her fill no matter how hard she looked. It felt like she was deficient in some Chloe-specific vitamin that her own body couldn’t generate.

Actually, it felt like she could stare her whole natural life and not get tired or bored or sick of the sight. She kind of hadn’t known she could feel like this. Maybe she’d never consciously thought about it, but it was like she’d never truly believed herself even capable of this kind of love, platonic or otherwise, before she came back to Arcadia Bay and Chloe came barreling back into her life.

And fuck Arcadia Bay, actually. Fuck all the people who were just totally, completely messing up their lives and especially Chloe’s life – Max experienced this stab of anger so visceral she wanted to go out and literally fuck anyone up who had ever hurt Chloe – fuck them. Fuck Madsen, Frank, fuck Nathan in particular. She burned hot with rage as images of Nathan’s assault came crashing into her mind unbidden. Not just Drunky Max of the Past; Max of the Future was completely on board. No one was ever gonna hurt Chloe on her watch again. Maybe she was pretty small and not that physically strong and didn’t know or even want to know how to shoot a gun. She’d still be Chloe’s knight in scuffed armor.

She’d gladly just hop into the truck with Chloe and go, Max and Chloe together against the world. What more could she possibly want and what more could she possibly need? I’d marry you today, Chloe had said. Maybe they should. Because they were in Vegas, which was like the number one capital in the world for this kind of thing, right? It kind of felt like fate. She could ask it jokingly, but also secretly maybe not at all jokingly.

_Slow down_ , Max thought at herself but also didn’t, because she wasn’t sure how much she could stand in the way of this. Well, she could stand in the way of it not at all, really, since she wasn’t going to be changing the past. It was more like, she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to stand in the way of this any longer. Maybe that realization should have felt disquieting. It didn’t, though. Not really.

She still wanted to actually live their wedding and remember it and stuff. But she wasn’t opposed to the marriage itself, not anymore. There was nobody she’d rather spend her days with than Chloe. She knew it as strongly and surely as she knew that she was never going to come across anyone she’d rather be with, either.

Chloe turned her head to look at something. She didn’t catch Max staring, but boy did Max ever stare. Her profile outlined, backlit by the menu sign behind her. The slope of her nose. The way she bit her very blue lip a little while she was deep in thought and even just the way she could actually get that deep in thought over hamburgers or chicken nuggets or whatever she was thinking about. It all made Max’s heart twist. Or expand. Or something. She’d never been so aware of her heart.

But she had to stop being this gooey. Well, not stop, but she needed to take a break, mostly because she was still standing around breathing in the quivering fumes of batter and burgers and fries, oh my, and it was not exactly doing wonders for her general well-being. She spun around, looking for a different distraction as she made her way outside the restaurant part of the building.

There were a couple of those toy machines, whatever they were called, in the lobby near the ball pit and the big leering statue. Not like the gumball machine back in Two Whales – like the square ones that spat out plastic capsules with toys inside. And there were always placards showing all the actual nice prizes you never, in a million years, would manage to win. But an idea was beginning to take shape inside Max’s head as she looked at them, and one of the machines looked like it at least pretended it was mostly fake jewelry themed.

She rummaged in her satchel for a quarter, found one, slotted it in, turned the crank, prayed for a ring. Fate would give her a ring, right?

Fate gave her a Troll doll. It didn’t even have blue hair. Total bust. _Maybe you should rewind time and kick the machine and try again_ , Max tried to suggest to her past self, but Past Max had already fished out another quarter and was soon cracking open another plastic bubble. A keychain featuring a rubber fish that squeaked when you squeezed it. Max managed to produce another quarter from somewhere on her person.

_Why do I have so many quarters?_ Max thought to herself as the junk began to accumulate around her. _Where did I get them all?_ A bouncy ball, a bottle opener clearly too small to ever fulfill its purpose in life, something which might have been a cat toy or just an unusually colorful dust bunny. So many tiny butterfly hair clips, you wouldn’t think they’d all be able to fit inside just one plastic bubble, and yet. The, finally, a glint of metal! Which turned out to be a charm bracelet with a sole, misshapen dolphin charm. Max had to give it up for the Max of yesterday: she was super determined. And also in possession of an endless supply of quarters, apparently.

And just then, she hit the motherlode. Her hands were actually, for cereal shaking as she cracked open the mint green and clear halves of the plastic capsule. Max couldn’t distinguish at all between her own, current happiness and her own, past happiness, but as she shook the two silver-like rings out onto her palm, she felt such intense joy it would have been scary if it didn’t feel so absolutely right.

It wasn’t even like the rings were nice. They were pretty dumb in a lot of ways. For one, they were way too small for adult fingers, obviously. Yeah, they were adjustable, but in that cheap ring way where the back of the ring would wrench open and look awkward. The heart pieces had been glued or melded on crooked and so would probably never actually fit together. They might even fall off. The rings were dumb, but they were also pretty perfect, just by dint of being rings in this very moment where Max actually, totally, actively wanted nothing more than to propose to Chloe, get Chloe to marry her, spend the rest of her life together with Chloe and start that life ASAP.

Max couldn’t help it: she would have high-fived Past Max if she could. Though it would probably have ended kind of awkwardly. She would probably have missed her own palm. Not that she could actually do it, anyway. Instead, she slipped the two rings into her pocket, leaving all the toys and junk on top of the row of machines for some lucky, or possibly unlucky, kid to find. Well, she pocketed the butterfly clips. Butterflies, after all, were kind of their thing.

Braving the nauseating smells, Max walked back into the main part of the restaurant where Chloe had sat down at a table and started digging into her food with great gusto.

“There you are,” she said as Max approached her. “Ended up they only wanted to serve me breakfast stuff. Egg McMuffins and shit. It’s the morning already. I had no idea, man.”

Max sat and watched as Chloe began to pack away her many, many Egg McMuffins and hash browns and even one lonely bagel with surprising speed and efficiency.

“Don’t you want anything?” she asked, her voice coming out a little muffled through a mouthful of food. Even that was endearing. Max toyed with the rings inside her pocket. Of course she wanted something.

“No. Yes. I mean.” It was actually ridiculous how nervous she was getting all of a sudden. Even Future Max was nervous, and she actually knew the outcome of all this. “Not food.”

“They have other stuff. They have milkshakes. Well. Maybe in the morning, they don’t. But I think they still have those garbage carrot sticks that garbage parents buy for unlucky kids instead of fries.”

“Speaking from experience? You sound kind of invested.”

“Nah,” Chloe said, obviously pleased with herself. “I always got all the fries.”

Max laughed at that. “It’s okay, I don’t want carrot sticks. And carrots are food, anyway.”

“Hm.” Chloe swallowed down almost an entire muffin at once. A snake couldn’t have ingested such a big bite. “Not so sure about that.”

The conversation was veering off in a decidedly non-proposal direction, not that Max was smooth at the best of times. But she so badly wanted to do this. She needed to do this. She’d have to reroute.

“I want something else though,” she said, trying so hard not to sound awkward.

“Kisses?” Chloe interrupted her before she could go on. “Wouldn’t worry about it. Maybe I’m not the one with the premonitions, but I definitely see a metric fuckton of kisses in your immediate future.”

“I definitely want that,” Max said, “but it’s not totally what I was thinking about.” To hell with it.

“I want you, actually.”

“Well, you have me. Mission accomplished, Caulfield.” Chloe flashed her the peace sign and a huge, goofy smile, then resumed working her way through what really surely was all the breakfast food McDonalds could muster. “Don’t worry,” she said after demolishing another bite. “I want you, too, Max. So much. You have no idea.”

“Yeah, but I…” Seriously, to hell with it. Cheered on by herself, Max sunk to her knees beside the laminate table, in front of the hard plastic bench Chloe had draped herself over. In front of _Chloe_. She sunk to her knees in front of _Chloe_. Chloe immediately stopped eating. She put her muffin down.

“Max?” she said, suddenly gravely serious. She looked – maybe not concerned, exactly, but something like it. Maybe nervous, a little. Just like Max.

“Maybe this is stupid,” Max began, as she stuck her hand into her pocket again, starting to fumble for one of the two rings, which had somehow gotten tangled up in one another. “We don’t have to do it or anything. Like, maybe you were just joking or being hyperbolic earlier. It’s totes fine if you were.”

“I wasn’t,” Chloe said without Max even needing to clarify what she meant. “I wasn’t joking at all.”

“Then do you…?” Max produced the ring and held it out to Chloe. “I’m sorry it’s just a tacky kid’s ring. And no box or anything. But do you?”

“I do! Max. I do. I do so hard.”

“You want to marry me?” Max whispered, hardly daring to believe it, forcing the ring open enough that she could slide it onto Chloe’s finger.

“Fuck yes. Max. I want to marry you. So much.”

For a beat, they just stared at each other. Max thought she might start weeping. Or maybe dancing. Her heart was pulsing so hard it seemed like she could feel her blood shooting through every vein of her body. Slowly, she stood. Without breaking eye contact with Chloe, she slid into the seat opposite her and tried very, very hard not to cry.

“Holy shit, Max.” Chloe looked just as starry-eyed as Max was feeling. “This calls for a celebratory drink.” It truly did, and Max somehow wasn’t even surprised when Chloe reached over and grabbed a flask out of Max’s satchel, even though she hadn’t seen her stash it in there.

“Should’ve been champagne,” Chloe said apologetically, “but vodka OJ will have to do.”

“That’s even a real thing, I think,” Max said. “Screwdriver or something. Some kind of tool, anyway. It’ll be great.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Well that kind of classes it up, right? Be right back, yo.” Chloe strode back towards the counter with a decidedly and uncharacteristically jaunty skip in her step. She’d apparently established one hell of a rapport with the cashiers – they handed over several bottles of Minute Maid seemingly free of charge.

She walked back towards Max with all these bottles crowding in her arms and a wide smile stretched over her face. It made Max want to jump up out of the booth and rush over, knock those bottles out of Chloe’s arms and kiss her forever. More than kissing would be fine, too. She wasn’t picky. But she forced herself to stay put.

“Okay, let’s do this,” said Chloe when she came back, handing Max one of the bottles. She took a swig of OJ and Max did the same. When the levels in the bottles seemed low enough, they both filled them up again from Chloe’s flask, closed the caps, shook them up.

“A toast,” Chloe said. “to Captain Chloe and First Mate Max.”

“May we always sail all the seas together!”

They drank. The orange juice tasted a little like the kind you get on airplanes, and the vodka, slightly heated up in the hot and balmy night, diluted the temperature of the cold juice to make the whole thing lukewarm. By all accounts, it should have been disgusting.

It was seriously the best cocktail Max had ever had.

“Now you,” Chloe said after they swallowed their gulps down.

“Here’s to…” Max stalled, trying to come up with something good. The phrase ‘absent friends’ flicked into her mind, but the thing was, of course, they did actually have absent friends. Rachel Amber, William. For so many reasons, she wished they could have been there. Not in the McDonald’s specifically, just around. Bringing them up, though, would surely put a damper on this amazeballs evening. Like, she wanted to share everything with Chloe, good and bad, but maybe she could let the bad wait until the morning, for Chloe’s sake as much as her own.

“To that blue butterfly,” she said instead. Butterflies. The hair clips! She scattered them across the table between them; Chloe laughed appreciatively, like it was a magic trick Max had planned out and not just a whim aided by too many quarters. Of course the clips were pink, but they were definitely semi-recognizable as butterflies.

“We wouldn’t have met again without it, right?” she went on, like she really needed to explain her thought process when Chloe clearly understood already. Screw it, she was drunk and getting drunker. Future Max just had to roll with her past weird decisions.

“We wouldn’t have met again because I would have been six feet under if you hadn’t been in the bathroom to save me, you mean,” Chloe said. “I owe you so hard, Max. You’ve saved my life so many times.”

_You saved mine_ , Max thought to herself, but even drunk she recognized it as a ridiculous, melodramatic thing to say and so didn’t say it. Future Max wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, because she wasn’t sure she would have been able to stop herself from rolling her eyes at herself had she come out with that. Chloe would have rolled her eyes, too, probably.

“You don’t owe me,” she said instead. “And I would do it again if I had to. Over and over.” She tapped her bottle of juice against Chloe’s and they drank.

Several toasts later and several gloriously celebratory texts later as they decided they needed to tell friends and family and the mail man and possibly enemies and so on, the remainder of Chloe’s food was coagulating on the tray beside her, thoroughly forgotten. The flask was empty and so were a good six bottles of Minute Maid. If Max and Chloe had been sobering up a little, they definitely weren’t any longer.

“You should wear those things,” Chloe said, toying with the hairclips that were still scattered across the table. “Like for our wedding. It’d be cute. And I’ll wear the top hat.”

“Yes!” Max had forgotten about the tiny clip-on top hat. “You definitely should.” Chloe half-stood and leaned over, almost losing her footing, and pulled that, too, out of Max’s satchel. She removed her skull cap and stuffed it in the pocket of her jeans and clipped the little hat onto her hair instead where it sat at a slight angle.

“Yeah?”

“Totally.” Chloe looked both adorable and hot. “Will you help me with the butterflies?” Max didn’t entirely trust Chloe’s ability to make a nice hairdo out of ten bitty butterfly clips when drunk, but she definitely trusted it more than her own. Besides, she wanted to feel Chloe’s hands in her hair again. Max could have ulterior motives! Total super villain.

“Aye, aye,” said Chloe and walked around to Max’s side of the table. She was definitely clipping the butterflies in completely at random, but Max really didn’t care, because now Chloe’s fingers were there, caressing her scalp, tugging a little on strands of hair as she pulled them straight so she could fasten a clip…

And then her hands moved down to Max’s neck. Chloe stroked it slowly like she was exploring the map of Max’s skin, trailing her fingers along the side – Max had never realized her neck was so insanely sensitive – touching the pad of her index finger to the spot where Max’s jawline met her ear, even dipping her fingers into the hollow created by Max’s collarbone, and there Max had to stop her, because seriously they needed to get to a hotel or something. Maybe a chapel first and then a hotel.

“Let’s go,” Max said, surprised and not surprised at how hoarse her voice sounded. Chloe gave her a smile and a look she couldn’t quite interpret, but relented. She stepped away, letting Max get out of her seat.

“Let’s go,” she echoed when Max paused.

“Chloe, can you believe this?” Max had to ask as she stood, because she really couldn’t believe it. Like, maybe she was going to wake up and this would all have been a dream. A really, really amazing dream, but still, that’d be a huge bummer. At least Future Max could take solace in the fact that this was one hundred percent real. To the best of her knowledge. She wasn’t going to worry about that.

“Kind of. No, not really. I’ve been in love with you forever, Max. How oblivious are you?”

“So oblivious.” Max stumbled on the word. “But at least I got there eventually, right?”

“You know I would have waited for you forever, right?”

“Yeah, but I’m glad you didn’t have to. It would have meant so many years we could have had together, but didn’t. I couldn’t have time-traveled all of that away.”

“Max.” Chloe grabbed Max’s arm.

“What?”

“We’re getting married!” Chloe looked like she was about to start jumping up and down. Max wasn’t far from that herself.

“I know!” she said with such a rush of happiness it seemed absurd. “You and me, joined in holy matrimony, forever and ever, amen.”

“Holy matrimony, BatMax!” They exploded into laughter, drunken laughter but laughter of complete and utter joy. They laughed for so long that Future Max started getting worried that she was going to pass out; it felt like she couldn’t get enough air. Max did her thing where she laughed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath and couldn’t even get a sound out; Chloe was emitting this high-pitched noise Max hardly ever got to hear out of her anymore, hadn’t actually heard at all since she moved back to Arcadia Bay. But they were holding on to each other as they were bent over, laughing helplessly, almost falling down onto the floor. They were so, so, so fucking in love. Max looked at Chloe, gasping for breath, and her heart announced its presence again; she’d seriously never thought about her heart this much. It of… bloomed, burst, she didn’t even know, there were all these emotions and she had no idea how to deal with them and she didn’t care at all. She caught her breath finally and threw herself at Chloe, Past Max and Future Max in tandem without even having to think about it.

“I love you,” she burbled, “love you so much.”

“I love you, too,” Chloe said, but couldn’t help but undercut the sincerity: “We can’t bang here, though. I know you want to, but.”

Actually, Max seriously did, and the discovery startled her. Not like she’d never had any feelings of this particular kind before, but never had they flared like this, making her body physically ache to get closer to Chloe. Not just ‘closer’; she couldn’t even begin to explain it, but she kind of wanted to be inside her. Not sex-type, fingering inside her, although that, too, but also like ‘merging into the same person’ inside her. Was this just the alcohol? Was this justifiable?

She didn’t care. She was kissing Chloe and Chloe was kissing her back, hard. Chloe was, even now, sucking Max’s lower lip into her mouth, and Max was running her fingers clumsily through Chloe’s hair, only somewhat impeded by the top hat. Chloe didn’t seem to mind Max’s clumsy ways at all; she gently bit the corner of Max’s mouth – Max was panting, lost for breath again – and started scraping her teeth down her neck, her hand moving to cup Max’s breast through her shirt–

“Hey!”

They sprang apart, looked up, wide-eyed, Max still trying to catch her breath. A big burly dude, category: security guard, was glaring down at them.

“You can’t do that here. Where the hell do you think you are? This is a family establishment.” His voice was low in volume but impressively threatening in tenor, and if he were going to start cracking his knuckles, Max might actually pee herself.

“I’m sorry, so sorry,” Max said, her voice almost cracking, because she had literally just almost been about to bone down in a McDonald’s, and, no regrets and all, but also, _so many regrets._ Who had sex in a McDonald’s, of all unconventional places? All those sticky kid germs. She pulled herself up by the red and yellow bench, her hands slippery with perspiration, and stood in front of the guy, swaying slightly. Chloe, too, had made it onto her feet, and she defiantly slipped her arm into the crook of Max’s.

“We’re getting married,” she said and Max felt that same blooming in her chest again. They were getting married! They were actually, truly getting married.

“Yeah,” Max reiterated, and she couldn’t stop another bubble of laughter from escaping. “We’re getting married!”

Max didn’t know if they had counted on the security dude getting moved and letting them off the hook or letting them proceed with the banging or what. She felt hopeful, though hopeful for no particular outcome. Whatever they’d expected, though, the security guard remained thoroughly unmoved.

“I don’t care if it’s a fuck-or-die situation,” he said, sounding more menacing by the word. “Get the hell out of here and don’t come back.”

“Should call the goddamn cops and let them write you up for public indecency charges,” they heard him growl behind them as they made a drunky, unsteady, but nevertheless quick beeline for the exit.

“Couldn’t help myself,” Max said once they were outside. Truth be told, she wanted nothing more than to jump Chloe again, but she tried to check herself.

“I know,” said Chloe, sounding very earnest. “Me too.”

“Let’s…” Max tried to clear her head by shaking it, but all that happened was she felt dizzier still. “Let’s go find a chapel. Let’s do this. Let’s tie this knot.”

“Always such a seafarer,” Chloe said.

“Huh?”

“Tying knots, dude. Oh, whatever,” she continued when Max still didn’t get it. “Let’s go find a chapel. Let’s go get married!”

“But where do we find a chapel?” Max scanned their immediate vicinity, but nothing leapt out at her. What was she even looking for? Would the sign say something traditional like wedding chapel or a corny-sleazy combo like Kwik-E-Marriage or what?

“I don’t know, man. I guess we just walk down the street and see how it goes. There’s gotta be tons of chapels round here, am I right?”

“Hella right.”

Chloe grinned.

“I always like getting a ‘hella’ out of you,” she said. Hand in hand, they began strolling down the strip, people-watching a little, but mostly with their eyes on stalks looking for a place to get hitched.

Music was pounding from everywhere, each club and bar snaking out its own tentacle of beats. Nowhere was it louder, though, than outside a place apparently called Cat House. Well, it might be called Hat House or Bat House since the neon gas in the first letter on the sign had ran out or something; Max wasn’t sure how neon letters worked. Regardless of the name, the music was so loud that trying to walk past the open doors felt like they were trying to breach an actual, physical wall.

Just as they seemed to be making some headway past that wall of noise, a man popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, and put his hand out to stop them. No, not to stop them. He was leering, sort of waggling his eyebrows, and he was offering them some kind of leaflet. Chloe blanked him and stepped ahead without even a glance in his direction, but Max took the leaflet from him almost per automaton: she was used to signing science petitions and scanning fact sheets and stuff.

Not that this was a petition, nor was it a fact sheet. It was an advertisement of some kind, a glossy leaflet. Chloe just rolled her eyes at it and pushed ahead, but Max hung back, hesitating.

“Maybe we should have a bachelorette party?” she offered, mostly for Chloe’s sake. Chloe stopped. “Maybe we should, I don’t know, get a lap dance or something. Whatever. They have ‘girls, girls, girls.’”

“Max,” Chloe said. “So much nah.” She grabbed the leaflet from Max and crumpled it up, clearly looking for a trash can to lob it into. Finding none within lobbing range, she just stuffed it into her pocket, where it protruded like a third hip.

“You’re the only person I want to see naked. Like, I would not be at all opposed to a lap dance from you, but I couldn’t give less of a shit about getting one from some random.”

The blush on Max’s face was nothing short of epic. She tried not to think about how insanely fucking bad she’d be at giving lap dances and fell into step with Chloe. They made some headway down the street, successfully avoiding interruption by other leaflet people, and then she saw it.

“Look!” Max pointed across the way. “Chapel of the Bells! That looks open.”

“Yeah,” Chloe said, sounding legitimately enthused. “It even looks vaguely respectable.”

Max looked down at her clothes: the Oh Deer tank she’d spilled some Screwdriver on, her skinny blue jeans that had somehow acquired a rip on the knee. She looked at Chloe’s mussed-up hair and patches of blue eyeshadow and the bra strap that was sliding down her shoulder.

“Do you think we look respectable enough for a respectable marriage place?” she asked

“Dude, who cares? We got the shoes on, we got the shirts. I got my snazzy top hat. You have those clips. They’re kind of fancy. We’re getting married!”

They fist-bumped, and, strangely, the bump of her knuckles against Chloe’s made Max immediately feel better about this whole thing. They were getting married! They had the cash to pay, probably! They weren’t going to be turned away. Past Max was immensely confident that this would be true and Future Max was coming at it from a vantage point where she _knew_ it was true, and so both Maxes future and past felt on top of the motherfucking world.

But something niggled at Future Max and she realized what it was as she and Chloe headed to the nearest crosswalk where it seemed to take forever for the lights to change. She didn’t want to really experience their wedding, or whatever you wanted to call it, without Future Chloe getting to experience it as well. Maybe, hopefully, _hopefully_ they’d get married at some point in the future. Maybe Max could propose again, even, and maybe she’d do it as soon as she got back, but there was something in her that made her feel almost skeevy about the prospect of revisiting their vows and enjoying it and so on when Chloe was, apparently, as blotto as her past self was. Chloe probably wouldn’t actually give a fuck, and of course Max wanted to be there in some ways – she vacillated, her past tipsiness making it difficult for her to make up her mind – but in the end, as the signal changed, she decided that when they were actually getting married, she wanted them both to be conscious of it. She didn’t want to come into it with a half-baked memory of a previous time that, more importantly, Chloe couldn’t remember. At least she knew now where they were headed. Back in the present, they’d go to Chapel of the Bells. Just as Chloe started to cross the street, Max took a split second to grab the photo out of her pocket.

And she traveled.


	8. Chapter 8

“Got it,” Max said when she arrived back in her present timeline. Even though she hadn’t been physically traveling and therefore hadn’t actually gotten markedly disheveled, she automatically smoothed her hair down. It sent butterflies flying all over the room. Rising from the bed, Chloe pretended to duck. She shielded her face with a hand.

“Careful with those things,” she said. She picked up one of the clips off the floor and tossed it back at Max, who didn’t manage to catch it. “You could put someone’s eye out, you know.”

“Well, maybe you’d look good with a patch.” Max plucked the last of the clips out of her hair and made out like she was aiming at Chloe, but then Chloe was right there, right in front of her, like she was the one with time-traveling powers and had somehow moved while escaping notice. She tried to grab the clip out of Max’s hand – Max twisted away, laughing, the grungy velvet of the armchair making her hair crackle with electricity as she attempted to get to her feet. She clutched the butterfly clip as hard as she could in her fist, its grip digging into her palms in a way that should have been painful, but she hardly even noticed, because Chloe was, again, right there, and she was pinning Max’s wrists to the armchair arms, face gleeful under the faded remnants of last evening’s blue cosmetics adventure.

“I’ll patch you,” Chloe countered, but Max was too preoccupied with Chloe’s proximity to process how little sense that retort actually made.

“Spacing out again?” Chloe didn’t sound concerned. She sounded downright pleasant and highly entertained. “Well, I know you’re not out on a photo jaunt. Since, you know.” She nodded down at Max’s wrists, still clutched in Chloe’s hands and pressed into the armchair. Max heart was beating hard. Audibly, she was pretty sure. At least she could hear it, loud and clear.

“So, basically, from what I can gather, you’re just frozen with fear because you know very well that you’re about to succumb to a patented Pricefield tickle-off! Except you’re not really in a position to retaliate, are you?” Chloe lunged, her body hovering above Max’s and her face especially hovering so very close to Max’s. “You know what otters do? They get attacked. By sharks. And it just so happens I’m a shark. And you’re the otter. You get it.”

Even though she was technically pinned down, Max could probably technically have broken free, but in practice she was unable to move as much as a finger. She couldn’t even summon a laugh, so consumed was she by the fact that she didn’t want Chloe to tickle her and she no longer wanted to pelt Chloe with butterflies. She just wanted, really badly, for Chloe to lean down a fraction further and crush her lips against Max’s. If she could have stretched herself up out of the chair a little more, she’d have kissed Chloe herself.

It was a stupid, doomed thing to do, but Max still made eye contact with Chloe. Clearly Chloe had been joking around, but Max actually did feel frozen. She felt downright petrified. How hard could it be to just be like, ‘Hey! I’m in love with you’? She knew Chloe felt the same way and everything; this difficulty she was having was completely irrational and she totally hated it. It was a non-issue! It wasn’t like Chloe could have changed her mind, right, since the previous day? No, Max told herself, that was also an irrational thing to think and just not something that would’ve happened overnight. That’d be asinine. She refused to think about it. For fuck’s sake, she was just going to do it. _Hey, I’m in love with you._ She’d done it before. She’d do it again. Like, nobody was that much of a coward.

But just as Max opened her mouth to say what she’d only half-planned, Chloe leapt up, let go of Max’s wrists, and skittered away from her. She ended back up on the bed, not quite looking at Max.

“You were saying? About the chapel.” She sounded nonchalant as fuck, practically beginning to buff her nails with a non-existent file, like their scuffle had never happened and it certainly hadn’t gotten weird in any way. But it definitely had gotten weird, right? Max felt confused, but it wasn’t like she could really bring it up without sounding like a lunatic.

Anyway, challenging Chloe would probs just lead to more confusion. It’d have to wait. She was the smallest bit relieved, maybe, that she wouldn’t have to bare her heart just yet. She was also highly annoyed with herself for being such an idiot about this whole thing.

“Oh. Yeah,” she finally said, a little frazzled. She tried to will it out of her voice: it went so-so. “Yeah, I figured out where we went.”

“Great,” Chloe said, all business all of a sudden. “So where is it?”

“It’s called Chapel of the Bells. I didn’t actually look for the address, but it can’t be that hard to find. It was, like, the hugest, fanciest place ever.”

“So did you do it?” Max might just be projecting, but she thought Chloe’s voice sounded kind of wistful. Not that she necessarily knew what wistful sounded coming from Chloe. “Did you see us tie the knot, I mean,” Chloe continued when Max didn’t respond.

“Oh, right. Tie the knot, people on boats, pirates. I get it now.”

“Uh, I’m sorry, but _what?_ ”

Max shook her head. “It was just a… it’s nothing. Just a joke you made the other night and I was too drunk to get it.”

“Fine, okay.” Chloe was clearly too tired to deal with Max being a dork. Max couldn’t blame her. She felt something similar. “So we know our next destination. You ready to roll?”

“I don’t know.” Max looked down at herself, assessing the overall situation. She was still wearing yesterday’s tank top, and the OJ stain had only seemed to get brighter since it dried or congealed or crusted over or whatever it was juice stains did. Her hair was stringy, greasy, still sectioned into weird pieces and strands from her undone butterfly eleganza. She had a strong suspicion that she smelled like a whole McDonalds store, or at least a Big Mac and a super-sized order of onion rings.

“Maybe we should shower before we go out,” she suggested. “I feel pretty gross like this. You didn’t shower while I was gone, right?”

“Nah. Felt like I needed to be on guard duty. Y’know, be ready to call 911 if you got a seizure or started hemorrhaging out the nose or whatever.”

No wonder Chloe had been bored, just sitting there. She was the best, Max thought to herself. Max would have to pay off her minibar bill. It would probably deplete her college savings. Chloe slouched out of the bed and across the room, avoiding Max’s gaze. She peeked inside the bathroom. Max, still in the armchair, looked at her looking, but when Chloe turned back she seemed to be staring slightly past Max, even though she was talking to her.

“There’s only one shower. No tub. I wasn’t expecting a Jacuzzi, but c’mon. Some honeymoon suite.”

“You get what you pay for, I guess. Or, in this case, what you don’t pay for. Or whatever.”

“True that.” Chloe yawned. “So who goes first?”

“I don’t really mind that much.”

“Are we in a hurry?”

“What, until they close? I’m not even sure how far away we are, but I’m pretty sure it looked like a twenty-four-hour place. I don’t know, I guess I can check.”

Max unlocked her phone and easily located Chapel of the Bells’ webpage. It definitely seemed like one of the bigger, better places in Vegas, and for sure it was a twenty-four-hour place. She noted the address and tried to get Google maps to open without totally freaking out on her, preemptively annoyed because that fucking app.

“Right. ‘Cause the shower’s at least big enough that we could probably have shared it if we’d had to save time.”

Max lowered her phone. Chloe was turned away again, so Max couldn’t see her face – Max couldn’t tell if she was teasing her or making fun of her or just being efficient. Either way, the prospect of them showering together, like, in a tiny space! at the same time! no clothes! hit her like a fist straight to the gut; her stomach twisted sharply, not unpleasantly. Before she could blurt out whatever was on her mind – something like No, I was wrong, we’re totally in a hurry – Chloe had slipped into the bathroom and started shuffling through the towels on the rack, looking for the least grimy one, probably. She stuck her head back out through the door:

“I call dibs on the shower, obvs. I’ll try to leave you some hot water, but y’know. Can’t promise anything.”

“Roger that.” Max slumped back in her chair, feeling upset for no justifiable reason. She resumed her Google wrangling mission. She didn’t know what it was, but that app seemed to totally hate her. Maybe she just needed a better phone. It was going on ten in the evening, she noticed, after the app opened and crashed for the fourth time. She really had been traveling back and forth all day. No wonder she felt so disgusting.

“Hey,” she called out in the direction of the bathroom. “Did you bring a change of clothes?” ‘Cause Max definitely hadn’t, and she was beginning to feel really grossed out by the idea of having a shower only to get back into her gross duds again.

Though Chloe apparently couldn’t hear her over the staccato noise of the shower, Max was getting the sinking feeling she’d have to brave the outdoors to pick up a couple of shirts. She could deal with her ripped jeans for the second day in a row, but she drew the line at stained tops. Something had to be open even this late, she argued in her head, trying to make it sound convincing. Probably just some tourist shop with rip-off prices; they’d be wandering around with t-shirts proclaiming their neighbor went to Vegas and all they got was this lousy t-shirt, but at least, Max consoled herself, they would be clean lousy t-shirts.

After some time, not that long, not long enough for Max to manage to get the maps app to do her bidding for once in its stupid electronic life, Chloe popped out of the shower amidst such a cloud of steam Max was hardly able to make her out. When she finally could, her heart jumped, her stomach dropped, all that jazz. Chloe’s cheeks were rosy from the heat and her face was free of makeup. Her hair was all faded to pastels and sheers, her natural blond beginning to shine through shades of teal, of pale turquoise, of lavender.

“Uh, hey,” Chloe said. Well, more like, ‘Uh, hey?’ maybe. Sort of quizzical. Max was probably staring. She was definitely staring – Chloe was right there in front of her, like, totally naked save for a ratty old towel, and Max was definitely staring.

“Hey!” Max exclaimed, contorting her voice into some OTT cheerful horror show, completely and totally mortified. “Can you, um, I can’t get Google to work, so.” She hated herself.

“Okay, sure,” Chloe said, even though Max had successfully communicated absolutely nothing of value.

“Great.”

She sped past Chloe into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her, tempted to lean against it, panting, like she was holding back a horde of zombies in a B-movie. But she didn’t. Instead, she tried very hard to clear her mind of literally any and all thoughts, good and bad, and stepped into the shower, kicking a broken-cased lipstick out of her way. Turning the water on helped. The sound of it hailing down drowned out her inner monolog at least a little bit, and she began to relax.

Max had not had a better shower in her entire life. Sure, there was some mildew clinging to the corners between floor and wall, wall and ceiling. The grout between the tiles looked suspiciously dark in patches. All the water Chloe had somehow splashed up onto the ludicrously pink walls and left there reflected the overhead light in a variety of harsh and eye-searing ways.

But Max felt like she had been covered in a full two days' worth of grime – at least. In fact, she felt like she was getting to slough off an entire second skin of dust and dirt and grease. She turned the water pressure up as high as it would go and relished the way the water nearly hurt as it sprayed down hard on her upper back. In the heat of the Nevada night, she did not really need to turn the temperature up, but she still did. She wanted it scalding; she wanted to imagine the dirt and the day-old makeup melting off and running down her body in gray little rivulets.

There was a bottle of some shower gel or other on the floor of the shower. The label depicted a flower Max couldn’t identify, but how bad could flowers ever smell, really? Even anonymous flowers. Or made-up ones. There wasn't much gel left in the bottle – Chloe had clearly gone all in – but Max squeezed it with both hands as hard as she could and managed to drip most of it out over her chest.

Which was really such a porny move. Even though it was mint green and not, as such, sexy-looking as shower products went, the way the gel slid down her breasts, glistening for fuck's sake, seemed faintly obscene to Max. She sighed and tossed the empty bottle back down onto the floor. Who was she trying to impress, anyway? There was nobody in here with her. _Chloe_ wasn't in here with her. Why hadn't she just done what she'd normally have done – what pretty much any other person would normally have done, probably – and emptied the bottle onto her palm instead of whatever the hell she was doing? She sighed again: she was such a terminally awkward person. But she began to lather up, refusing to go without the last of the soap just because she'd lapsed into self-pity or loathing or whatever.

The idea, though. Max couldn't shake it. The idea of Chloe in there with her... she could feel her cheeks prickle as certain images took shape in her mind, unbidden but not wholly unwelcome. What would she do? She'd laugh at Max's wannabe sexy soap pouring just for the sheer obviousness of the move, but she'd be into it too, probably. Max would look away a bit, embarrassed, and Chloe would, like, grab her chin and make her face her... and then she'd laugh again, or grin, before starting to kiss the embarrassment away. The kisses, Max could imagine: she'd had plenty, and twice over. Not that she'd had enough. Never enough. She wanted to kiss Chloe of her own accord, hard and hot and new, not just on-rails kissing in the past. But at least she still knew what Chloe's lips felt like on hers, the way she tasted, the way she pushed harder, more urgently, kissed hungrier when she got... when she... Max let out a gasp. She hoped so hard Chloe couldn’t hear her.

Max cupped her breasts, imagining it was Chloe doing it, or at least Chloe's hands guiding her hands, teasingly telling her what to do. No, she'd pretend that she was just helping Max lather up, but actually it would be the most obvious excuse ever for going to town on the groping. That's what she'd do. Feigning innocence and giving nothing away, she'd circle the tips of her fingers around Max’s tits, slowly slowly until Max was, like, begging for it almost, and Chloe'd still be acting like she was doing nothing untoward, and then she'd reach her nipples. Max rolled them between thumb and forefinger, biting her lip as they began to stiffen almost painfully, but, like, good painfully. She shut her eyes and imagined it was Chloe doing it, Chloe's longer, steadier, surer fingers drawing her nipples into peaks, stroking them, pinching them. Maybe she'd kneel down and take them in her mouth: kiss them, lick them, bite them just a little, not too hard yet not hard enough. Tease Max until she was almost at her breaking point. And then what would happen? Without thinking, almost, Max slid her hand down her stomach, further down, curling it around her thigh…

But no. She couldn’t do this. Not here. Opening her eyes wide, she jerked away from the wall she’d begun to lean against. She’d get a fungal infection or something. Fungus of the back. Not such a sexy thought. She quickly finished up her oblations, mashing shifty hotel two-in-one shampoo/conditioner in her hair and hoping for the best, but she couldn’t get her mind to settle again. Rinsing her hair, turning the shower off, almost tripping over the lipstick she’d kicked away before, she felt sore and swollen with want. Maybe she should have had a cold shower instead.

She shook her head at her image in the fogged-over mirror. _Get a grip, dude._ One of the towels was still barely clinging onto the rack after the advent and departure of Hurricane Chloe; Max grabbed it and wrapped herself in it. The towel was pink, but in so patchy a fashion that Max had to entertain the suspicion it had probably been white once and accidentally washed with something red, like maybe the ugly curtains. Whatever. At least it was clean, or purporting to be clean.

She tiptoed out of the bathroom, unwilling to put the whole of her sole down on the cold tile, and crashed onto the sofa outside, knocking over an empty lip-shaped ashtray. It broke into what looked like a hundred pieces of jagged glass. Maybe she should have fixed it. She didn’t; she just looked around the room. Chloe wasn’t there. Uneasily, Max began swapping the towel for her underwear. She’d have to put her clothes back on if only to go out and get some new ones, and Chloe… Chloe had probably just gone out for food. If she’d been taken away by an ambulance or something, Max would have heard it. With difficulty, she rolled her skinny jeans up her still-damp legs and zipped them. Yeah, she told herself, she definitely would have heard an ambulance.

A second later, the door in the hallway slammed; startled, Max clutched the towel back to her chest.

“Yo, Max.” Preceded by two t-shirts she was holding in front of her like a riot shield, Chloe barged back into the room. Max’s jaw dropped. Well, it didn’t, but mentally it kind of did.

“How did you know?” Max said. “That’s some mind-reading shit, Chloe.”

“Nah. Just know my BFF.” She said it breezily, like it wasn’t a big deal. “You haven’t willingly worn a messy shirt in all the years I’ve known you.”

She still didn’t, or still wouldn’t, look at Max; she headed straight toward the coffee table and threw the shirts down, grinding the pieces of glass further into the carpet. Two could play that game: Max didn’t, though not _wouldn’t_ , look at Chloe. She looked at the shirts instead.

They were pretty much exactly as tacky as Max would have suspected. One was infinitely better than the other, though. It was black, at least, and featured the words Sin City above a stylized drawing of a semi-naked curvaceous redhead with a whip. Max would never have purchased it, but it wasn’t immediately offensive to her person. The other one, though, was so bright green it gave the bathroom tiles a run for their money. Not in terms of color, just in terms of hideous brightness. It said “What happens in Vegas…” in a truly horrible font and, both front _and_ back, it depicted a cartoon flamingo thrusting a cocktail glass out at the viewer. It was so ugly and tasteless even the most hipster of hipsters wouldn’t be able to ironically pull it off.

“Yeah,” Chloe said, gesturing at Max to scoot up so she could sit down next to her. “I know. They were the cheapest and we’d better hold on to the money we got considering the night we apparently had. You know you would’ve given me shit if I’d tried to lift something actually normal-looking, too.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Max had to admit. She still didn’t really want to don the flamingo, though.

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Chloe said, like she was reading Max’s mind again. “Don’t worry,” she continued, reaching out to grab the green shirt. “I don’t know anyone in Vegas, anyway, so I don’t mind committing style suicide.”

Now Max wanted nothing more than to wear the stupid flamingo shirt. Well, maybe more like she wanted nothing more than for Chloe not to have to wear it. This was what love was, she guessed. Wanting to inflict flamingos on herself.

“No way,” she said. “Hand it over.”

Chloe clutched it to her chest, looking obstinate. 

“You know I can’t wear black anyway,” Max said. “I’d look totally jaundiced.” 

“That’s not true, Caulfield. You look great in everything.” She paused, her face beginning to color. “Uh, I mean, you know, everyone looks great in black. That’s why they all wear it in Europe.” 

“Yeah, but you hate flamingos,” Max tried, not that she knew whether that was true or not. 

“I have literally never said that. I have mad respect for flamingos. They are the punk rockers of the bird world.” Chloe sounded as confident delivering her swiftly determined opinion as ever, but if she thought Max didn’t catch the way she was semi-longingly eyeing the more normal t-shirt, she was nuts. 

“Okay, well, it’s gonna clash with your hair. And your tattoos.” 

Chloe seemed to waver. 

“Oh, fine,” she said, like she was doing Max a favor, but she gave her a grin as she tossed the green shirt Max’s way and took the black one for herself. “Thanks, Max.” 

“No problem. Thank you for getting the shirts.” She’d learn to love, or at least accept, the flamingo. Suddenly shy – it wasn’t like Chloe had never seen her in a bra before – Max turned away to let the towel down and pull the shirt, the ugly, ugly shirt, over her head. Chloe didn’t tease her about or challenge her on turning away to get dressed. Max wasn’t even sure whether she’d expected her to. 

“All right,” was all she said, after she’d rustled her way into her own shirt. “Let’s head out.” Her expression was so carefully blank and her voice so clipped that it gave Max pause. But she followed Chloe out the door, anyway. 

As they exited the lobby, the heat of the evening rolled over Max with a force almost physical, like it was a pillow someone was trying to suffocate her with. It wasn’t even like it was that warm; the evening was hot in a balmy way, not really at all oppressive. Still, Max felt like she’d been cooped up forever. And she had, she supposed, in a way. 

“We’re going right on the corner of East Sahara and South Las Vegas. It’s actually really close.” Chloe’s voice was still kind of curt. 

“Good, ‘cause I’m still not sure where your car is,” Max said, trying to make Chloe act normal through acting normal herself. 

“Yep. Struggle’s real.” After that, Chloe fell silent. She walked a few steps ahead of Max and no matter how quickly Max walked, she never seemed to be able to catch up. At least she was following someone who knew where they were going. Max’s sense of direction was okay, but Chloe’s was better. 

Chloe had been right: the chapel was indeed very close. It made sense, Max supposed. Last time she’d traveled, she’d felt herself getting more and more tired, giddy as she was. They’d probably stumbled into the first tacky hotel with a honeymoon suite on offer. Hell, they’d probably stumbled into that hotel specifically because it was tacky. Having revisited their drunken selves, it totally seemed like the kind of thing they would have done. 

“Here we are,” said Max pointlessly as they approached the building she’d almost visited in the previous timeline. Pointlessly because there was a giant sign saying Chapel of the Bells and it was blinking a little, and even if it hadn’t been it would’ve been eye-catching. 

“Here we are,” Chloe agreed. She slowed to a stop; Max was even able to catch up with her. 

“So,” Max said after a pause. She’d thought Chloe would say something. “We’re heading in, right?” 

“Right.” This time, Max was the one who led the way. Chloe trailed behind just slightly, but Max trudged on, because they were here now, they might as well do this, no matter how she felt about it deep down, no matter how weird Chloe was acting. 

“Okay. Look, Max.” Just before Max could enter the wide doors of the chapel building, Chloe grabbed her by the shoulder, both shoulders, and turned her around to face her. “Before we do this…” She was interrupted seemingly by the thought that they might be in someone’s way, blocking the doors, and so shuffled them both to the side with a surprisingly graceful tandem sidestep. 

“What’s up?” Chloe’s voice was so portentous and her face so glum that Max was beginning to get worried. 

“Look, Max,” Chloe said again. “Every time you’ve come back from your little trips, you’ve looked more and more freaked out to see me. Freaked out by me. Whatever. Like, hella freaked out.” 

Max guessed that was true, in a way. But not like that. 

“I don’t know what I did to cause that and,” Chloe went on when Max tried to get a word in edgewise, “I’m not sure I wanna know. Like, I think I can guess. So it’s like, fine. I’m so goddamn in love with you. I’ve known it forever; now you know it; probably the whole fucking world knows it at this point. Whatever.” She took a deep, deep breath before going on, not meeting Max’s eye. 

“I’m sorry I made things weird,” she said. “And I have no idea how I got you into this–” She flapped her hands at the chapel doors, sliding open and closed in the distance “–but I’m really sorry about that, too, however it went down. Like, I’m sorry you had to deal with this. I’m sorry if this too much for you to deal with. And I don’t blame you if it is. If I am.” 

With that, she let go of Max’s shoulders and marched towards the chapel doors. Max kind of wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but she knew she’d never forgive herself for laughing in this moment. She caught up with Chloe with what felt like a leap but which was probably a jog at best. 

“How can you say you love me and then just bolt like that?” she asked, wondering if Chloe was recognizing on some subconscious level that Max was echoing her own words. “C’mon, Chloe. I’m so in love with you. All kinds of in love with you. You made nothing weird. You made it the best.” 

She looked at Chloe until she finally looked back at her. 

“You always do, you know.” 

Chloe widened her eyes at Max. 

“You can’t be serious. You never said _any_ thing.” 

“I didn’t know, Chloe. I didn’t know and then I just realized. It’s always been like this. I just didn’t…”

“You should have told me,” Chloe said, but she was smiling, grinning, her eyes beginning to sparkle like the eyes of a Disney princess. “Fuck, Max…”

“I did! I told you yesterday. It was so embarrassing.” 

“Now you know how I feel.” Their laughter came out breathless and giddy. 

“Wait,” Chloe said slowly, like it was just dawning on her. “That means I didn’t talk you into this?” 

“No,” Max said. She was surprised at how vehement she sounded. “No. Not even a little bit. I… may actually have proposed.” 

“You proposed?” Max wasn’t used to hearing Chloe sound like that. It was almost a squeal. “That’s cute as fuck, Max.” 

“Well, you know. I’m very into you.” 

“So.” Chloe’s voice took on a seductive timbre that made Max’s entire body twinge. “Does that mean I get to mack on you?” 

“It means you get to do all kinds of things. Anything you want.” 

“I like the sound of that.” Chloe’s hands were still on Max’s shoulders and it made it so easy for her to pull Max closer, for Max to lean into Chloe. Their lips were just about to meet when–

“Outta the way, chicks!” someone hooted. “This is the best day of my life!” A dude and a lady actually dressed up in full wedding regalia, gowns and tuxes and also cowboy hats, skipped into the chapel, hand in hand. 

“We weren’t _in_ your way,” Max called out after them, but the doors had already noiselessly slid shut behind them. 

“‘Chicks’? Fuck you, too!” Chloe glared at the doors for good measure, but then she laughed. “But I guess we also have some business to attend to.” Max tried not to feel too gravely disappointed when Chloe let go of her. 

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she said. She looked up at the chapel sign again. She told herself that however much she wanted to be with Chloe forever and ever, it really would suck hard to have gotten married and remembering nothing about it. 

“C’mon then, girlfriend.” Chloe linked arms with Max and gave her an all too brief kiss on the temple. “Let’s go get divorced.”

\---

“Good evening, ladies, my name is Holland, welcome to Chapel of the Bells! How may I be of service?” 

It was something of a relief having somebody straight up smiling at Max and Chloe after the night Max had just relived. She still remembered the McDonalds bouncer. Of course, Holland’s pleasant demeanor only lasted so long. 

“Oh. It’s you two,” she said, and her smile dropped as she looked them over. Max felt like turning and leaving, because really? They’d made enemies here, too? 

“Hey,” Chloe said, taking charge. “I’m Chloe Price, and this is…” She hesitated, clearly unsure whether they’d rejiggied their surnames and, if so, how. “This is Max,” she settled on. “Yo.” 

“We, um, we got married here last night,” Max supplied. 

“Oh, honey,” Holland said. Her smile was back, but it was stretched tight and clearly patronizing. “Y’all don’t look very happy. For newlyweds, I mean.” 

Max scraped her foot against her ankle for want of something else to do. If she didn’t look very happy, it was for a ton of really complicated reasons. Like she was trying not to let all the blood in her body escape out her nose and also she was in the process of getting divorced from the person she wanted to be with most in the world, okay? Which was fine, whatever, they were in love and they both knew it, which was definitely the most important thing, but it had still been a really stressful day. She did not need some lady named after the Netherlands lowkey laughing at her. At least Chloe seemed to be keeping a slightly cooler head for once. 

“Well,” said Chloe, using a polite voice she used to reserve for grown-ups, but which Max hadn’t heard since they were about twelve, “we need to talk to the guy who married us.” 

“The officiator,” Max supplied. 

“Yep. Where is he? She?” 

“Oh, brother.” Holland was full-on smirking now. “How about you come with me.” It wasn’t really a question, or even a suggestion, but Max and Chloe did as she commanded and followed her blindly down winding white hallways. 

“Look who’s here, Kev” she said to some dude in passing. The dude almost dropped the sheath of documents he was fondling. 

“ _You_ ,” he said. Yep. Definitely made enemies here. “I thought I told you…”

“Whatever, hon. Just let Wilma take care of it.” 

Holland led them into a large room and closed the door behind them. 

“What’s–”

“Wilma will come see you soon. Don’t touch anything.” 

Holland left, closing the door behind them. Max eyed Chloe apprehensively. She was definitely going to touch something.

\---

“Max and Chloe!” Wilma greeted them when she came in, all smiles and even one-armed hugs. “So good to see you.”  


They’d clearly met her before, but it was still a relief to realize Wilma was this super comforting lady, sort of like you could probably put your entire life in her hands and it’d for sure turn out okay. Max took to her immediately. She was clearly in a rush, a pen tucked behind her ear and a slab of portfolios clutched under her arm, but she still gestured at Max and Chloe to sit down on one of the two white metal benches stationed along the walls of the room. For herself, she pulled up the daintiest, tiniest little stool and sat straightening her portfolios on her lap as Chloe began explaining their conundrum. While she’d initially looked very happy to see them, she got a confused look on her face as Chloe started talking. She only looked more so the more Chloe explained, but then Max supposed it wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence.  


“So, basically, we thought we should probs get it annulled,” Chloe finished up. “That’s what you do when you haven’t banged yet, right?”  


“I think so,” Max confirmed when Wilma didn’t say anything.  


“Well, there’s been some mistake, I think,” Wilma said, a little hesitant.  


“What do you mean?” Chloe sounded immediately defensive, like ‘a mistake’ implied that she’d made it. Max rifled through her memory of the past ten minutes for things they might have explained badly or fucked up in general.  


“Do you not remember?” Wilma was starting to look not just confused but kind of strange. “Oh, dear. I didn’t realize… I didn’t think this was why you were here.”  


“Remember what?” Max finally asked, when it became clear Wilma wasn’t going to relinquish the information unprompted. Another thing they couldn’t recall? Had they been booted out of here and gone to a different chapel or something?  


“The certificate I gave you girls,” Wilma finally said, very, very slowly, “was not what we call legally binding.”


	9. Chapter 9

“It’s void?”

“It’s void.” Chloe’s voice sounded entirely flat, the way it did when she could not believe something was happening, or didn’t want to believe it. “It’s void. We came all this way, and spent all that time, and did all that shit for nothing.” 

Max pressed her eyes shut, trying to think. Chloe scooping the certificate off the side of the desk, holding it up and staring at it as she called to Max. Max scurrying over, quietly freaking out already. They’d stared at it forever, right? Trying to find a loophole or even so much as the name of the place that had issued it. Or had they just glanced over it once, taking in the fancy curlicue ‘Certificate of Marriage’ banner and their signatures but not much else then put it back down in shock? Max honestly couldn’t remember, the day had been so long and so overwhelming. She snuck a sideways look at Chloe, who was clearly not as disoriented as Max felt. She looked angry, plain and simple. She had clamped down her jaws and squared her shoulders. 

“It had a stamp on the back. Several watermarks…” Wilma said, then faltered. Yeah, thought Max, watermarks that would have been like ninety-nine percent invisible in the gloomy mood lights of the honeymoon suite. 

“I’m sorry, girls.” Wilma’s voice was like a warm hand squeezing your shoulder. “I was just trying to help. A memento. I didn’t know how… Maybe I was out of order.” 

“No,” Max said, her voice just about okay. “It was really nice of you. Thank you.” She waited for Chloe to say something, but she didn’t pipe up. 

“I’ll leave you to it,” Wilma said, not specifying the ‘it’ but indeed walking out of the room and leaving them there on the intricate, faux-ironworks bench. 

“Hey…” Max was scrambling for something to say. She hated it when she couldn’t gauge Chloe’s state of mind. “You okay?” 

“Sure. I guess.” Chloe’s voice wasn’t flat anymore, and, when Max chanced a sideways glance at her, she didn’t really look angry. Guiltily, Max felt something like relief wash over her that Chloe, Chloe the superhero supervillain superstar who always knew what to do and where to go and who to see, finally seemed nearly as mixed up as Max. “It’s weird, right? Not just me?” 

“Definitely not just you.” Max was toying with her ring, easing it up her finger to reveal the identical green stain circling the skin beneath. At least that one tiny thing was proceeding as expected. “All this time and all this effort to get divorced. And we never even had to.” 

“It’s weird. I feel…” But whatever Chloe had been about to say, she didn’t. She was staring at Max’s ring, entranced almost. It reminded Max of Chloe’s childhood kitten Bongo – the look he used to get on his dopey kitty face when you waggled a thing of catnip in front of him. 

“Can I have that?” Chloe asked, clarifying: “The ring.” 

“I guess so,” Max said after a pause. In a way she wanted it and in a way she didn’t. She couldn’t keep wearing it, Chloe would never stop making fun of her and people would start asking questions she couldn’t really answer, but she wasn’t much of a keepsake person. Chloe was. Chloe would put the rings in a tiny box next to her snow globe and the old photos and the old comics and keep them forever. Max just lost stuff. But she’d draw a picture, maybe. Write about the rings, her and Chloe, this whole adventure in her diary. Man, her hand was gonna cramp up so hard. 

“Yeah,” she decided. “You can have primary custody. Just let me come see it whenever I want.” She slid it off and put it on Chloe’s outstretched palm. Chloe pocketed the ring carefully, taking her own off in the process. 

“My loft’s your loft, you know that.” She shot Max a quick glance and a smile. “So, hey. Did you tell anyone? I saw you glaring at your phone when we woke up.” 

“Oh, yeah,” Max remembered. Funny, it seemed like so long ago. “I texted pretty much everyone.” Brooke, Warren, all these people she’d have to explain herself to. She tried not to cringe. 

“Happy texting or sad texting?” 

“Chloe.” Max nudged her with her elbow. 

“What? It’s just hard to believe! I know you got to live the evening all over again, but some of us feel a little more blindsided.” 

Fair enough. Max put her head on Chloe’s shoulder. 

“Happy texting. The happiest.” 

“I take it there’s an emoji shortage in the world now?” 

“For sure,” Max nodded, inclining her head towards Chloe. It wasn’t only an excuse to touch her lips to the side of Chloe’s neck. “I used up all the exclamation points, too.” 

Chloe laughed, slipping her arm around Max’s waist and tugging her closer. They were so flush against each other Max could feel the throb of Chloe’s heart. 

“Don’t worry, you weren’t the only one deploying the weapons of mass text-struction.” 

“And _you_ call me out on ‘for cereal’?” 

“Do as I say, Max, not as I say!” Chloe laughed again. Max vastly preferred laughing, happy, smiley Chloe to not-going-to-look-at-you-all-day Chloe. “For serious, though, I’ve been feeling bad about those texts all day. I mean, I thought I probably tricked you into this somehow. So getting my smug on about it didn’t seem like the nicest thing to do.” 

“Is that what you were doing while I was out? Worrying about your texts?” Max pictured Chloe pacing back and forth through their room, checking her phone, trying to make herself remember the previous evening and failing. The image was kind of heart-breaking. 

“Well, yeah.” Chloe shrugged. “But I also killed my old high score on Snake!” She punched the air with the hand that wasn’t curled around Max’s waist above her head. Victory! 

“Snake? What is it, ‘98? Can you even get Snake on a smartphone?” 

“Yeah, it’s a little something called an _app_. Maybe you’ve heard of them, grandma?” 

“You’re hilarious. Remember earlier? Don’t make me tickle you, Price,” Max said into Chloe’s neck. She tried to sound threatening, but it was hard when Chloe’s skin was so soft and smelled so perfect. “I’ve got you in a compromising position.” 

“I think it is you who is in a compromising position, Caulfield.” Chloe squeezed Max’s side to make her point. Max squirmed away, a giggle bubbling out her mouth, and Chloe followed, making her hands into jokey claws. Max would obviously not let it go down like that, though - she grabbed Chloe by the claw, forcing her hands still. A long time ago, when they were kids, Max used to be the stronger of the two. Smaller, but stronger. She didn’t know if it still held true, but Chloe didn’t break away. 

She just leaned in closer and put her lips on Max’s. Taken aback, Max tried to stifle the surprised noise she made. Chloe didn’t bother to stifle a giggle. She kissed Max until her lips parted, her tongue slipping in so Max’s mouth opened more; she was so secure in her kissing in a way Max would never, she thought, be able to feel, and then, dizzily, she stopped thinking entirely. She just surrendered and let Chloe explore her mouth, her lips, her neck, skimming her hands down Max’s body and settling them on her waist. 

Her waist? 

“Ha!” Chloe said as she leaned back, squeezing Max’s sides once more. “I win.” 

Max almost sputtered with indignation. 

“You can’t just kiss me as a diversion tactic, you know,” she said accusingly, trying to calm her breathing, calm the patter of her heart. 

“Are you sure? It seems to work pretty well. You let me go pretty much instantly.” Chloe smirked. Smuggo. 

“So strategic.” At least she’d gotten a kickass kiss out of it, arguably, so she let it go. She’d get back at Chloe later. 

“You know who I texted?” Max said, changing the subject to something gross because her heart just wouldn’t settle. “Victoria.” 

“Why do you have that loser’s number programmed?” 

“I know, right?” 

“I texted Mom. Rachel’s number.” She fell silent. Max didn’t know how to deal, what to say, so she just grabbed Chloe’s hand back and rubbed the top of it with her thumb. “I texted fucking Frank,” Chloe continued after a little while. “Frank, what the hell. Blissed out enough to share with my shitty drug dealer.” 

“If it makes you feel better about your life and your choices,” Max said, “I texted Juliet.” 

“Who?” 

“Juliet Watson, this girl who works for the school paper. It’s like a cheaper way of taking out an ad. Or hiring a plane to sky write it. Our marriage announcement.” 

“So you were pretty happy, too, then. If you wanted everyone to know about it.” 

“Chloe, I was so happy.” 

They were quiet, both of them, settling back into the positions they’d been in before their play fight. Chloe had pulled Max close to her, her arm still around her waist. Max had tilted her head onto Chloe’s shoulder again. 

“So.” Chloe had a look on her face that Max both loved and feared. It always augured something – often something awesome, like breaking into the school swimming pool, but then occasionally something terrifying involving a gun. Always something interesting, though. 

“So?” 

“Everyone already knows. My mom. Your parents?” 

“No.” At least as far as Max could recall. “But everyone else, pretty much.” 

“Maybe we should…” Chloe tapered off. She looked at Max meaningfully, practically waggling her eyebrows. Max didn’t get it. 

“What?” 

“You know.” 

Maybe it was more like she didn’t dare to believe she was getting it. 

“Nope,” she said, regardless. “I don’t.” 

Chloe had like 127 different variants of the eye roll. Even so, she managed to bust out one Max had never seen before. 

“Fine. You leave me no choice,” she said. 

She slid off the bench. She started groping in the pocket of her jeans – Max automatically did the things proposed-to people always seemed to do in those lame YouTube videos; it was like she didn’t even have a choice. Her hand flew up to her mouth, covering it; she could feel her eyes widen. 

“Where did you even get these tacky rings?” Chloe asked, shaking her head, as she got them out. 

“I– ” Max began. 

“Whatever. Max, you know.” Chloe perched on the floor, leaning her chin on her hand, her elbow propped up against her propped-up knee. “You know I’m not very good at feelings and shit.” She sounded way earnest, though. 

“I guess you make me feel like I’ve never had feelings before. Fuck, that’s so stupid.” She muttered it almost like an aside to herself. “I have all the feelings for you, Max. I love you. I want to be with you forever, basically. We could just pack our shit in the truck and leave Arcadia Bay and never talk to anyone else ever again and I’d be okay with that. I’m pretty sure I don’t need anyone else. At least not as much as I need you.” 

“I need you, too.” Max spoke so softly she could hardly hear her own voice. “I really need you,” she reiterated, a little louder. 

“Will you, you know.” Max could tell Chloe was embarrassed: the tip of her nose had gone pink. “Will you marry me?” 

“Uh, yeah,” Max said. “Duh.” She was too excited, no, too fucking delirious to imbue the words with the sarcasm they deserved. “I will totally marry you, dude. We can’t skip out on the Bay, though. We need to go back and throw a Two Whales party. Right?” 

“Good point.” Chloe was grinning so hard Max could see, like, every one of her teeth. She waved the rings at Max but did not put one on her finger. 

“Should we not wear them?” Max asked. 

“Probably not? I feel like people put them on when they get married.” 

“In The Sims, the sims always whip out the bling when they propose. I mean, I’m pretty sure.” 

“The bling. The Sims. I don’t even…” Chloe shook her head, still grinning. “I guess we should have had engagement rings. I think that’s how they do it.” 

“Oh, right. Yeah.” 

“But I don’t care. Do you?” 

“No. Not even a little bit.” 

Chloe made her way back up to the bench and sat down next to Max once more. They threaded their ringless fingers together. Max was just about to turn and give Chloe a kiss – not a distraction kiss – when there was a noise at the door. 

“Hey! Wilma! Great timing.” Chloe was more exuberant than Max had ever seen her, not just since she came back to Arcadia Bay but ever since they met in pre-school. “Can you marry us?” She leapt up off the bench. Max, clutching her hand, had little choice but to jump up next to her, like they were doing a gymnastics routine. 

“Can I marry you?” Wilma sounded taken aback. 

“Officiate,” Max supplied. 

“Yeah. Not _marry_ -us marry us.” 

“It wasn’t an hour ago you said you wanted to get your marriage annulled.” 

That was true, but it wasn’t like they’d wanted it annulled because they didn’t want to be together. Max was struggling to find a way to phrase it – she couldn’t exactly start talking time-travel to someone uninitiated, and even talking underage drinking felt potentially unwise. Even Chloe couldn’t seem to think of something to say. Wilma’s gaze moved from Max’s own face to Chloe’s to their hands clasped together between them. 

“Of course I would, sweetheart,” Wilma finally said, breaking the silence. “Did you get a marriage license?” 

“Oh, yeah.” Max didn’t know how it had slipped her mind, considering the lack of one was a large part of how they’d ended up with a dummy certificate in the first place. “I mean, no.” 

“No,” Chloe confirmed. For a second, she looked crestfallen, but it didn’t take her long to perk back up. She let go of Max’s hand and took out her phone. “Where can we get one?” Even as she asked, she apparently started to google for the answer. 

“Why, a marriage license bureau.” 

“And they’re open at night?” Max asked. Chloe’s enthusiasm was the most infectious thing ever, like a totally potent drug. 

“You want to go to the Clark County one,” Wilma said. “But it closes at–”

“Midnight,” Chloe finished Wilma’s sentence for her, staring at the screen of her phone. She slammed the battered case shut and jammed it into her back pocket. “It’s twenty past eleven. How far is it?” 

“By car, you could make it.” It was sweet how invested Wilma seemed in their impending marriage. “But you’d have to leave immediately.” 

“Let’s go,” Max said, but Chloe was already at the door. 

“God, come on, Max,” she said impatiently. Max followed. 

“We’ll be back!” they called out to Wilma. Even as they sped off through the hallways, Max could hear her chuckling. 

Back out on South Las Vegas Boulevard, Chloe practically jumped out into the traffic to flag down a cab that came sailing down the street. Max had never seen Chloe hail a cab before, but it probably shouldn’t have surprised her that she seemed to be a pro. 

“Dude,” Chloe said, clambering into it, “Half past now. Get the fuck in.” 

And Max duly obeyed. 

“Closest clerk’s office,” Chloe instructed the taxi driver. “And step on it!” 

Then she grinned at Max. Before buckling up, she leaned over and hugged her close. The knit of her cap tickled Max’s cheek. 

“Always wanted to say that,” she whispered into Max’s ear, and Max could feel her smile. 

\---

At twenty minutes to midnight, Chloe and Max scrambled into the license bureau where there at least wasn’t much of a line. Max couldn’t stop tapping her foot, she wanted to get to the window before time ran out so badly, but thankfully it didn’t take too long a while for the clerk to finish up with the couple ahead of them and wave Max and Chloe forward. 

“We’d like to get a marriage license.” 

“Of course.” The clerk smiled blandly at them. He pushed a pages and a pen through the opening in the glass. “Would you fill out this application, please?” 

Max let Chloe have it first and she started scribbling hard. It didn’t take her long; Max soon took over. Social security number, date of birth, address, signature, and done. When she finished, they both tried to slide the paper back in through the window at the same time, and their hands touched. Even now and even though it was ridiculous, Max could feel herself flushing. 

“That’s fine,” the clerk said, eyeing the application. “And your IDs, please. Driver’s licenses will do.” 

Luckily, they’d brought those in addition to their fake IDs. The clerk just took a second to scan them. 

“That’s fine,” he said again, giving the driving licenses back. “And that will be seventy-seven dollars.” 

Max sucked in her breath. 

“I take it you’re not the type to make a lucky number seven joke?” the clerk asked just a little dryly. 

“Just give us a sec,” Max said. She turned to Chloe. 

“Let’s pool what we got, all right?” Chloe said and started rooting around in her pockets. Max reached for her satchel. She could feel the seconds ticking away as she splayed her wallet open and drew out note after crumpled note. There was some change in her pocket – she pulled that out as well. 

“Here’s forty, forty-one… two…” Max kept looking. There was a five-dollar bill stuck with a smidge of gum to the inside of her bag. She thrust it into the air triumphantly and added it to the pile of notes and coins on the counter. She snuck a look at the clerk – he was watching them with an eyebrow raised, but he seemed okay about their hunt, so she kept on going. 

“I have twenty-five here,” Chloe said, “and some change.” A lot of change, a whole handful. It clicked and clinked jauntily as she poured it down onto the pile. “Help me count?” 

It took a few minutes, but when Max realized it amounted to a full five dollars and twenty-two cents, she could have cried with happiness. 

“That’s enough!” she said. “That’s seventy-seven.” She tried to divide it into reasonably tidy stacks before pushing it towards the clerk. They had to wait a while while the clerk straightened the money out, uncrumpling notes and sorting coins and so on, but finally he was done and he filled out the rest of the application for them, then a separate license paper. He even stamped it. Max was beaming hard; Chloe actually whooped out loud. In a rom-com, the whole room would definitely have burst out in applause for them, but in reality, there was no one there except them and the clerk and some other bored clerk. Still, their clerk looked pretty happy for them. 

“Congratulations.” They were given the certificate. Max grabbed it and clutched it to her chest. “I hope you have a long and fruitful marriage.” 

“We will!” Chloe said jubilantly and offered him her knuckles for a fist bump. He chose not to accept. “To Wilma!” She whooped again and legged it. 

“Thank you so much!” Max cried and ran after Chloe. “Thank you!” 

\---

“Wilma, we’re back!” Chloe called out the moment the doors of Chapel of the Bells slid closed behind them. Initially, there was no Wilma to be seen, just a glaring Holland over by the front desk, but then Wilma rounded a corner. She sprinted over when she spotted them, clapping her hands together. 

“You made it!” she said when Max handed over the license. “Oh, I’m so happy for you.” She began bustling them down a hall. 

“You’ll officiate, right?” Max asked, just to make sure. She did not want to deal with the likes of Holland or Kev if she didn’t have to. 

“Of course! I would be honored, girls.” 

“You’re a total hero, Wilma,” Chloe told her. 

“Yeah, the hero we need. I don’t know about deserving you, though. We’ve fucked up so much tonight.” 

“Oh, come on now, don’t be like that,” Wilma said in her oh-so-soothing voice. “You’re getting married!” 

“Hell yeah!” 

Wilma led them into a larger hall with an altar at the back and two rows of pews forming an aisle in the center of the room. It wasn’t exactly decorated the way Max would have decorated, but it was still incredibly festive: huge bouquets of white flowers, white balloons, white garlands, white fabric draped over all manner of things. There was even a white piano, complete with pianist. 

“Whoa,” Max said. She had the unwelcome thought that maybe they wouldn’t be able to pay their way – she glanced at Chloe, who’d also gotten a pensive look on her face. They shouldn’t have bought those shirts. No, they shouldn’t have bought all those drinks. 

“Uh,” Chloe said, slowing down. “I’m not sure… About the bill?” 

“Or the package, maybe?” They might, Max thought, offer something slightly less fancy for slightly cheaper. Not that they had any cash left at all after the license fee, but there was her emergency credit card. Her parents would understand, surely. 

“Oh,” said Wilma, understanding at once and patting Chloe on the arm. “You don’t want to worry about that; you settled up yesterday.” 

“Did we?” 

“Sure thing.” 

Well, that was perhaps the one responsible thing they’d done the previous evening, if they had. Max wasn’t at all sure Wilma wasn’t just being kind, but she decided to let it go. Gift horses, mouths, et cetera. Chloe evidently decided the same thing, nodding hard. 

“Now let’s get down to business.” Wilma sat them down in the very front pew. “How would you like your wedding to proceed?” 

“What do you mean?” 

Max wasn’t sure, either. It struck her that she had never actually attended a wedding. Not even her own, as it turned out. 

“Are you quite happy with what you’re wearing?” 

Max looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Max. They both shrugged. 

“I’m cool with these if you are,” Chloe said. “Obvs I’m not the one wearing that monstrosity, though.” She pointed at Max’s flamingo shirt. 

“I’ve grown weirdly accustomed to it,” Max had to confess, even though she did not want to admit it out loud. “But is it a problem that we’re not very dressed up?” 

“No, no.” Wilma paused. “If you do want to look a little more, well, dressy, we have some gowns and tuxes for rental…”

Max could only imagine how expensive that’d be. She wasn’t really a white bridal gown kinda girl anyway, she didn’t think, and Chloe definitely wasn’t. 

“If it’s an issue of cost, I could try to sneak you some headwear. Veils or a cap, something like that.” 

“No way,” Chloe said before Max could. “You’ve done so much for us already. You’re not risking your job or whatever, even though it is badass of you to offer.” 

“Besides,” Max added, “it’s not like we’re getting married to have this beautiful ceremony or wear awesome clothes. We’re getting married because we love each other so freakishly much.” She almost started tearing up as she spoke. “The clothes don’t matter. Right, Chloe?” 

“Couldn’t have said it better myself, babe.” 

“I would say that sounds like a sign of a good, loving union,” Wilma said, smiling at them both. “You know it’s not just about the ceremony. You want this for life. Now, do you have a witness in mind?” 

“A witness?” Max nearly groaned. Another thing they hadn’t thought about. Max wasn’t sure she had any friends she’d actually want to witness their wedding anyway, and even if she had had one, they probably wouldn’t have been in Vegas. 

“Mom could do it over Facetime, maybe,” Chloe said. “Is that a thing?” 

Wilma seemed to be trying not to laugh. 

“I’ve never had a request for that before, but I’m afraid it’s not a thing, no. The witness needs to be there in person and sign a statement.” 

“Fuck.” 

“Don’t worry about it; we’ll just have one of the marriage coordinators bear witness if you don’t have anyone with you.” Wilma made a note on her clipboard. “Do you want to walk down the aisle together?” 

“Yes,” they said, simultaneously and fervently. 

“I had an inkling,” Wilma nodded. She jotted down another note. “How about vows? Have you prepared anything or would you like to choose something conventional?” 

“No, we haven’t prepared anything…” Max didn’t really want conventional vows, either, though, and she’d be surprised if Chloe did. “Is it okay if we more, like, freestyle?” 

Chloe nodded eagerly. 

“It’d be, y’know, straight from the heart,” she said. 

“Well, of course that’s okay. It’s your wedding! Now, let’s just recap. You two will enter through there.” Wilma pointed toward the front of the room at a tall pair of double doors. “There’s an antechamber you’ll be waiting in until you hear the beginning of the wedding march. You walk out and you walk down the aisle. I’ll be waiting at the altar for you. I’ll say a few words and then you say your vows. You’ll be married in no time and I’ll be so happy to see it.” Wilma smiled at them. “Now, let me go fetch the marriage coordinator. Unless you have any questions?” 

“You’re supposed to give us our rings, right, so we can give them to each other?” Chloe held out the two rings, quite bent and battered at this point, and gave them to Wilma, who took them with a chuckle. 

“Why, I recognize you li’l guys,” she told the rings. She got some tissue paper out of her pocket and wrapped the rings up. “Is that everything settled, then?” 

“Oh, wait, just one more thing,” Max said before Wilma could turn to leave. She reached into her bag. “Would you mind asking the witness or someone to take some pictures of us with this camera? I’m not sure how much film I’ve got left, but you can use it up." 

“Not a problem.” Wilma admired the camera, turning it this way and that. “It’s a beaut, this one. I promise we’ll take good care of it.” 

“Thank you.” 

“You all set, then? You shouldn’t have to wait long.” 

“We’re good, right?” Chloe asked Max. 

“We’re great.” 

As Wilma departed the room through the door in the back, Max and Chloe made their way down to the antechamber. 

\---

As it turned out, they really didn’t have to wait long. It felt like ten seconds after they’d closed the doors that they had to open them again. Chloe slid her hand into Max’s and down the aisle they walked to the strains of Mendelssohn. 

At the altar, Wilma was beaming at them. Even Holland, the lone person in the pews and their apparent witness, wasn’t giving them quite the stink-eye she had before. Max didn’t know if she was supposed to walk at any specific speed or take any specific steps. Clearly, neither did Chloe. They just held hands and walked together slowly, savoring it. 

When they finally reached the altar, the hymn wasn’t over yet, but the pianist skillfully brought it to an end without making it sound cut short. Wilma gave him the tiniest thumbs up, which was kind of adorable, and then she turned to Max and Chloe. 

“We are here tonight,” she began, “to celebrate the incredible and strong love between Maxine Caulfield and Chloe Price. They’re already bonded in heart and in mind, but tonight we celebrate the joining of their souls through marriage. Now, I believe our brides would like to recite vows of their own. Max?” 

“Uh, yeah.” But what did Max know about vows? All she knew she’d read in books or seen in movies, probably; she remembered the vows from _Corpse Bride_. Half-remembered. She hadn’t really liked the movie that much and she’d been, like, ten when she watched it. Something about a candle? 

But Wilma was waiting, Chloe was waiting, and she needed to say something, even if she couldn’t get it perfect. She’d just try, like Chloe had said, to speak from the heart. 

“If you’re ever in a dark room, I’ll be your light,” she said. “All the moments you want to remember, Chloe, I’ll be by your side, taking pictures. And we’ll sail the high seas. I’ll make you a mixtape with music you like and we’ll go on a road trip in the Twinpeaksmobile, like you said before, just you and me because you’re the only person I like anyway. Is this too corny?” 

“Normally I’d say yes just to be a dick,” Chloe said, “but no. It’s so perfect.” Her eyes were suspiciously shiny. “If anyone ever tries to fuck with you, I’ll end them.” 

“I’ll never let your munchies go unaddressed.” 

“Mac’n’cheese when we get back?” 

“Deal.” 

They grinned at each other. 

“If there’s anything I can ever do for you, literally anything, I’ll do it. I’ll always be yours. My body and my soul, whatever’s left of it, the tattoos. I’m yours.” 

“And I’m yours,” Max echoed. “And everything we do, we’ll do like a team.” 

“Best team ever, am I right?” Chloe reached out the hand not already holding Max’s toward her face. 

“Teammate,” she said, stroking a strand of Max’s hair behind her ear. “BFF,” she went on, letting her hand run down the side of Max’s face, down her cheek. “Wife,” she finished, touching the pad of a finger softly, quickly against Max’s lower lip. 

Max didn’t trust herself to say a single word. She’d definitely start bawling. 

Chloe turned toward Wilma just a fraction; she dropped one of the rings into Chloe’s open palm. Max got one, too. 

“Max Caulfield,” Chloe said. “With this hella tacky ring I thee wed.” She slid said ring down on Max’s finger, settling it right on top of the band of green skin again. It was slightly cutting into the back of Max’s finger; it was also somehow the most comfortable thing she’d ever worn. It felt like it belonged on there. 

“Chloe Price.” Max was trying hard to say it, not gulp it. It was not very effective. “With this ring, that, since you asked, I got out of a toy capsule machine after like a hundred tries because I just needed to propose to you that bad–” Chloe raised her eyebrows, nodded, wiped away an actual tear with the back of her hand “–I thee wed.” 

With a tiny sob, she managed to get Chloe’s ring onto her finger. 

“Well, ladies!” said Wilma brightly – Max had almost forgotten about her. “You may both kiss the bride!” 

They both started giggling, suddenly shy. Chloe stroked Max’s cheek again before curling her hand beneath her chin tilting her face up. Max placed a hand on Chloe’s shoulder and leaned forward. 

The kiss was long and sweet and the first, Max knew, of so fucking many it made her head spin to think of it. Her camera was whirring away somewhere in the background, and when Chloe bent Max backwards over her arm to give her plant a real movie star kiss on her, it sounded like even Holland was cheering. 

\---

“This one’s the best one.” 

Max was flipping through their new stack of photos on their walk back to the hotel. She showed Chloe the picture of the two of them running back down the aisle, hand in hand, through a shower of white and gold confetti. Holland had gotten really into the photographer gig in the end. 

“You’re crazy,” Chloe said, though she looked at the photo. “They’re all perfect.” 

“Nope, I’m pretty sure that’s you.” 

“No, you.” 

They stopped – again – and kissed under a streetlight – again. 

“Ow.” Chloe’s ring snagged on the photo as she gave it over to Max to add back to her pile. A minute bead of blood formed where the open back of the ring had scratched her. 

“Don’t worry, we’ll save up to get real rings,” Max consoled. Chloe was rubbing the back of her finger. 

“No way. Not unless we commission them to look exactly like these ones, at least.” 

“These hella tacky ones?” 

“Yeah. I don’t want any other ring. I love it. And I love you.” 

“I love you.” 

“No, you. C’mon, girl, walk faster,” Chloe whined, impatient as always. She sped ahead of Max and gestured at her. “It’s two minutes away. Seriously, c’mon already, slowpoke.” 

“Maybe you shouldn’t have lost your truck.” 

“I know, right? But we’ll find it. Just _after_ we consummate this shit.” 

“Yeah.” Max was blushing; she couldn’t help it. What? It wasn’t like she’d had sex before. “After we do that.” 

“Yeah. So come _on._ ” 

And Max did. She broke into a run, laughing in exhilaration and grabbing Chloe’s hand along the way. Clearly totally obnoxious to all the passersby, together they ran, oblivious to any and all protests, because fuck them. 

\---

Back at the hotel, Max was still giddy with equal parts exhilaration and shyness. Chloe, having remembered their key card this time around, let them in and let the door slam behind them as she danced into the room and up onto the bed. It squeaked beneath her feet as she bounced higher and higher. 

“C’mere, Max!” She leaned over and offered Max her hand. Max climbed up next to her, but not before taking a deep breath and losing the flamingo shirt, throwing it on the shaggy carpet next to her bag and trying not to blush so hard she’d suffer an aneurysm. 

Chloe was blushing, too, though, just a little. She took her hat off and ran her hand through her hair. The smile she shot Max made heat pool in her lower belly, a flare of unadulterated _need_ so piercing she could have cried out. 

“I like it,” Chloe said, plucking at the royal blue strap of Max’s satin bra. “But maybe you should lose this, too. Just in case.” 

“Just in case of what?” 

“I don’t know. You think I thought that far ahead?” 

“Of course not. You know what?” Max could barely think; it was a wonder she was actually managing to open her mouth and say words. “I’ll lose mine if you lose yours.” 

“You drive a hard bargain, Caulfield.” But Chloe took her shirt off. Slowly, seductively, keeping eye contact the entire time, she rolled it up her body, over her breasts, and let it fall behind her. Unlike Max, she wasn’t wearing a bra at all. 

“Wowser,” Max gulped. 

“You like?” 

“Yeah. I love.” 

Unable to tear her eyes away from Chloe’s chest, she reached behind her back and, fumbling slightly, unfastened the clasp of her bra. Without even pausing, she tore it off, gratified when her speed, or the sight, maybe, made Chloe suck in her breath. She held the bra in front of her for a second, then let it drop. 

“Good job.” Chloe was studying Max in a way that made Max’s entire person clench with heat all over again. “How about these?” She tapped Max on the hip. 

“If you want them taken off,” Max heard herself say, “you’ll have to do it yourself.” 

“Oh, really?” 

“Yeah, really.” 

“Challenge accepted.” 

Chloe unbuttoned and unzipped the fly on Max’s jeans easily, but as soon as she started trying to move the fabric down Max’s legs, they both fell over. The sheets squelched unpleasantly beneath Max’s bare skin, but she didn’t even care. As Chloe was working on her jeans – she’d managed to get them halfway down Max’s thighs, no small feat considering the über-skinny style Max went for – Max gingerly peeled the rubbery covers away from what was likely a rubbery mattress. 

“Dude, Chloe, look.” 

There was a white square on the mattress just beneath the covers, clearly the backing of a Polaroid picture. How had they managed to scour the entire place for photos without even lifting the sheets? Chloe paused in her undressing endeavors and watched as Max picked it up and flipped it over. 

It was a shot of the two of them clearly taken right after they’d gotten married (well, technically not really) the first time. The gold and white confetti in the air matched the confetti they’d ran through just moments before and they were covered by nothing and no one. Ruffled and disheveled and plastered in makeup and hats and butterflies and God knows what, they beamed at the camera, hand in hand. Despite everything, they didn’t look remotely drunk, just taken with each other to the point of insanity. 

For a moment, they just looked at the picture. 

“If we had found this earlier,” Chloe finally said, “you wouldn’t have had to go through all that time traveling shit. We would have saved a lot of time.” 

Max considered that, but just for a second. 

“I guess. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world, though. It was pretty great.” 

Chloe’s smile said more than she could have expressed in words, probably. She reached over the side of the bed, fishing for the strap of Max’s bag and pulling it up towards them. Max couldn’t tell exactly what she was doing, but a minute later, she’d selected a photograph and put it next to the one on the bed. It was a remarkably similar shot as far as composition went – the two of them, hand in hand; the glitter and confetti making the air shimmer – and, as for the subjects, they looked just as blissed out and deliriously in love in both of the shots, give or take a shower, some ugly shirts, and a couple of hours of sleep. 

“We’ll frame them,” Max said, “side by side.” 

“Yeah,” Chloe agreed. “We’ll put them up on the exposed brick wall in the kickass apartment we’re gonna get together when you graduate.” 

She carefully put the photos on the bedside table. 

“But now–”

Whatever Chloe was about to say, she was interrupted by Max shoving her hand down the back pocket of her jeans and laying a kiss on her so intense they both, she was pretty sure, saw actual stars.


	10. coda/prolog

“No.”

“No?”

“What do you mean, _no_?” Chloe sounded downright belligerent, which was simultaneously scary and kind of hot. Even the dude they were chatting to must have realized Chloe could definitely take him in a fight right now, because he tried for a smile. An uncertain, shaky, still kind of disdainful smile. 

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “you two are very drunk. And so young.” He looked, suddenly, uncertain as to whether he should scold them for underage drinking or just try to get them out of there stat before Chloe started wrecking stuff. There was this arch of silver and gold balloons nearby that looked so stupid and ugly even Max kind of wanted to wreck it, and she wasn’t usually aggressive. At least not that much. 

“Are you sure you want to get married? At your age?” the man continued. Max was not impressed with his appeal and, judging from the noise she made, neither was Chloe. 

“We’ve been together for all the timelines,” Chloe said dismissively. “Through every life. You wouldn’t understand.” 

Max knew she was right: he wouldn’t understand. In fact, Chloe’s words just made him look even more scared, concern for either their mental health or the ugly balloon arch plastered all over his high-and-mighty face. 

“Irregardless—”

“That’s not even a real word,” Max interrupted aiming for rude and landing on vaguely hostile, and he gave her a look of such withering disgust that she almost, but not quite, regretted piping up. 

“ _Irregardless_ , you need a marriage license to get married here at Chapel of the Bells. I bet you haven’t thought of that, have you?” 

Of course they hadn’t. 

“Isn’t that what you’re here for?” Chloe asked. “To give us marriage licenses?” 

Dude curled his lip at them. Max was getting sick and tired of his abject disapproval. How were they to know the finer points of getting married in Vegas? She was pretty sure she’d heard of all kinds of cases where people got married accidentally. Clearly you couldn’t do that if you needed to plan shit out in this much detail. 

“Of course not.” The ‘you idiots’ was implied rather than stated outright. “You have to go to a marriage license bureau. They’d help you.” 

“Fine. Be right back.” Chloe turned on her heel, but Max lingered, sensing that this awful man wouldn’t make it that easy for them. 

He didn’t. 

“Hold on there.” He looked so, so smug, standing there, assessing them. Max had never thrown a punch before and she wasn’t going to start now, but secretly, drunkenly she kind of wanted to. 

“The closest marriage license bureau is open between eight and midnight. It’s not open at–” He paused to very ostentatiously check a watch with a face the size of a dinner plate. “–four forty-five A.M. 

“Besides,” he said, moving in for the kill, “they’re not going to grant a license to two drunken little _girls_. Come back tomorrow, when you’ve sobered up. If you have your parents’ permission, I mean.” 

Max could feel Chloe slump beside her; she turned her head. Chloe no longer looked belligerent or angry or violent at all. She looked sad. She looked like she was going to cry. Chloe did. It practically set Max’s heart aflame, but she didn’t know what she could do. As the man, pleased with his victory, gave a short laugh and left, Max helplessly glanced around the room, stroking Chloe’s arm. 

“Chloe, it’s okay,” she whispered. “This place’ll still be here tomorrow.” But she was sad, too. Of course they really could get married any goddamn time; it didn’t have to be tonight. There would just have been something uniquely appealing, even romantic, in actually doing it on this night, the very first night of their lives together as girlfriends. Fiancées. Partners. 

“Can I help you ladies?” came a new voice, a different voice, a voice not consumed with its own self-admiration. Instead, this voice sounded worried, a little, but not about the balloon arch. Worried about Max and Chloe. Actually, the voice sounded kind of like Joyce. Max looked up, feeling her own eyes starting to dim with tears and hating it, hating all of it. 

“I don’t know,” she said to the woman who even looked like Joyce, down to the shape of her eyes and the clip holding her buttery yellow blond hair away from her face. “Probably not. I guess we’ll just leave.” 

“Now, don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I’m sure we can fix whatever’s ailing you.” The woman put a large, warm hand on Max’s shoulder. “My name is Wilma McCormick and please do call me Wilma. How can I help you two? Nobody’s been hurting you, have they?” 

“Not recently,” Max murmured, but she was touched by Wilma’s concern. “We’re okay,” she said, even if she didn’t really feel it. “We’re – we wanted to get married.” 

“Oh, isn’t that nice!” Wilma’s whole face lit up. “Do you know, I have a daughter about your age, and she’s engaged to be married to a very lovely woman all of her own. Have you been together for long?” 

“Years,” Chloe said, turning to Wilma and Max, voice gruff. “So long.” 

“We’ve been best friends forever,” Max clarified, “but we only just got together tonight. We realized it tonight. And we got engaged.” For some reason, she felt like she could confide in this woman. It was probably her Joyceness. 

“That’s lovely,” Wilma said, almost cooed. “And the hold-up, from what I understand, is you don’t have a marriage license?” She was tactful enough not to mention anything about drunkenness. Actually, Max felt very nearly sober again with how taken aback she’d been. 

“Yeah. That’s it.” Max was really close to crying now. “We just wanted to… since it’s our first night together as a couple and not just friends, I guess we just wanted a sign of that. Like a memento, almost. I mean, we’ll come here tomorrow or whenever to get married, but still.” 

“Tell you what.” Wilma seemed thoughtful. “We do have dummy certificates. It wouldn’t be legally binding, of course, but if you two just wanted… well, a kind of souvenir…”

“Really?” 

“Are you for real?”

\---

After Wilma had left the room to find a ‘VOID’ rubber stamp for the dummy certificate, Max and Chloe high-fived. 

“You are the actual best,” Chloe said and smiled triumphantly. “That was way cool, the way you talked her into doing this. Best souvenir ever, am I right? People will totally buy it, too. Maybe we can get free stuff out of it. We need a honeymoon, right?” 

“Totally. Just, by the way, I didn’t talk her into anything. She offered!” 

“Sure thing, Max. Max Caulfield, evil super genius. I bet you did a lot of time traveling to make this happen.” 

“Oh, yeah? What, is my brain leaking out of my nose?” 

“Not yet!” 

“What’s that even supposed to mean?” 

“I don’t know, man. Insert dirty joke here?”

“You’re so out of this world amazeballs, you’re gonna make me spontaneously combust and die.”

“Way to make it _morbid_ , Max.”

Wilma quietly cracked the door and stepped inside, a large piece of paper rolled up in her hand and secured with a posh-looking white bow. Her perfume wafted into the room before the woman entered herself – lilacs, Max dreamily noted. Such a nice scent to run into in late October. This was, in so many ways, totally meant to be. 

“All right, girl,” said Chloe, reaching over and tugging on a strand of Max’s hair. “Let’s go get this fake wedding on the road!” 

\---

Done and dusted and properly fake married at last, Max and Chloe left the building, their certificate tucked up underneath Max’s arm. There was a whole concerto of elaborate eye rolls happening behind their very backs – apparently not a single person in The Chapel of the Bells had endorsed Wilma’s plans and schemes except Wilma. Wilma and Max and Chloe, of course. They walked down the side of the road arm in arm, swaying only a bit. While they weren’t really sure where they were going, they would probably have made it to whatever destination quicker if they hadn’t felt the need to stop to kiss beneath every streetlight. But they were only gonna be fake-married-not-actually-married once, right? 

“Let’s find a hotel,” Max called when Chloe tarried, trying to take a photo of Max and failing miserably. “Let’s go and consummate this marriage.” 

“Dirty, Max. And it’s not even really a marriage.” 

“Fine. Let’s just go bang, anyway.” 

“Now you’re talking!” 

The first hotel they encountered, the confusingly named Great Northern, was clearly fated to be theirs: they had a big old sign advertising their honeymoon suites and fancy breakfasts right there in the window. Max allowed herself about a second of dizzy worrying that they’d kick them out for not being actually married, or for being super trashed, or for not being twenty-one, even, but then she realized that Chloe would get them in because there was literally nothing Chloe couldn’t do. Except keep herself from falling fast asleep when they crashed inside their suite, onto their hilariously gross bed, which was fine, because Max was just about there herself, and they had a whole life of sex ahead of them, anyway. She left her satchel on the ground and flung their wedding certificate wherever, then reluctantly made herself leave the bed and put it on the pretty little pink desk in the far corner. She didn’t want either of them to step on it if they had to use the bathroom during the night or day, whatever time it was, Max was so tired and so booze-saturated she had no idea anymore. Their amazing wedding photo was still in her hand and she tucked it into bed because it, she thought, deserved to be tucked into bed. Before she could tuck her _self_ into bed, however, she pretty much passed out. At least she managed to grab Chloe’s hand first.


End file.
